Every major American city has its nearby rural antique paradise. Manhattan residents escape to the quaint boutiques of the Hamptons. Brimfield, the country’s most famous flea market, is an hour and a half from Boston. And Chicagoans head east to New Buffalo, Michigan, where they hop off the interstate and meander up the Red Arrow Highway. Stopping at the antique malls sprinkled among the B and Bs, wineries, and multimillion-dollar “cabins,” wellie-clad shoppers paw through enameled saucepans and oversize marquee letters in hopes of replicating ideas spotted in the pages of decor magazines.
When I go thrifting in Michiana I usually like to take my dad, who’s still baffled by the popularity of Eames chairs and prefers to scrounge for older stuff. But on my most recent trip, he was busy helping my stepsister trade in her Hummer for a Kia Sportage, so I started out solo.
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From Niles I drove about half an hour back south to Elkhart, Indiana. On my way into town I came across The Same As It Never Was Resale (637 N. Beardsley, Elkhart, Indiana, 574-606-4493) on the first floor of a lonely two-story building at the corner of Beardsley and Michigan. It’s the kind of place people like me, forever in search of a Jackson Pollock painting hiding in the corner of a roadside junk store, dream about: merchandise spilling out onto the sidewalk, an unassuming hand-painted sign with a tongue-in-cheek name, and absolutely no Internet presence (so it’s impossible to find unless you stumble on it). I threw my car into park and raced inside but was disappointed: everything looked like it had been purchased at La-Z-Boy within the past five years and was priced outrageously. No Pollocks.
We left without buying anything and continued on to Heart’s Desire (3030 Old U.S. 20 West, Elkhart, Indiana, 574-294-6096), the place where Michiana locals will all send you for antiques. Billed as the largest antique mall in Indiana, it’s got a mazelike interior—complete with a functioning post office and a packed cafe—and sells things like enameled metal buckets filled with wooden apples, handmade soaps, and clever new kitchen gadgets. While I marveled at a booth stocked with classic midcentury pieces, a chapter of the Red Hat Society sauntered through. Decked out in purple, with crimson headgear, these devil-may-care grandmas passed right by four upholstered Eames shell chairs selling for a mere $200 apiece. As the Carpenters lulled the after-breakfast crowd into a shopping stupor, my dad and I cruised the curio cabinets and Transferware patterns, unearthing more A-list objects ignored by the coffee-cake crowd: an antique sideshow poster (World’s Strongest Woman!) for $200 and a bank of blue school lockers for $100.
