Thursday, March 15, 2012

Road Trip Day 3 - The Mother Load

As I write this it's Wednesday evening about 10:30 Florida time.

Spent the night in Columbus, OH Tuesday night. Headed out about 10:30 Wednesday morning and only made it about 40 miles before I saw a huge 750 dealer antique mall.

Full disclosure time: I dislike antique malls. In general stuff is overpriced, there seems to be a lack of what I'm looking for, and the individual owners of the stuff for sale are generally absent. The only people available are the mall owners and staff. You can't strike as good a deal with an intermediary. But I stopped anyway. Good thing. Great googly boogledy. You should have seen all the stuff.

This is Springfield Antique Center in Springfield, OH. It's just west of Columbus. I recommend it. There is about two and a half acres of floor space in here. I saw most of it. I took about eighty pictures. Here's the first half.


Cool kitchen table and chairs and stuff.

I bought a couple of things, but those pictures are for another post. This post is pretty much just mid century modern objet d'lust. Thirty nine more pictures inside.




I wish I could remember all the prices, but . . .
This is just about looking. I'm not even going to bother you with very many captions.



The lesson learned here is - shoot at an angle.








My family had this same type of toaster as I was growing up.






I can't explain my fascination with molded fiberglass.

This is called Marble Race. I had it as a kid.






Whoa! Midcentury sensory overload.






Super whoa! Extra double midcentury sensory overload.








And I thought I had a big Nipper. This guy is almost 3 feet tall.


That's the first half of the Springfield Antique Center, Springfield, OH pictures. You'll get the rest tomorrow. While I can't really remember any prices, feel free to ask any other type question.


We'll be right back with . . . more stuff.

13 comments:

  1. I'm enjoying your trip. Thanks for the virtual tour! Those ceramic bullet planters are way cool!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Not to get all philosophical or metaphysical or whatever it is, but for this much cool old 50s and 60s stuff to still be in existence after all these decades makes me ponder the enormity of America's manufacturing capacity back then.

    There must have been MILLIONS of those little metal tripods and pots made.

    We were a better people back then. We weren't a cheap product consuming, planned obsolescence, break it and buy a new one society.

    Too bad we are now.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tons of mid century goodness. My heart only stopped about 3 times while reading this post!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm not rich, but I do have fairly decent limits on my credit cards.

    Do you know how HARD it was to only spend a hundred bucks in that place.

    I could have spent thousands.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The one normal advantage to the "antique" malls is that especially in the smaller towns they don't have a lot of love for, or sales of MCM stuff, so sometimes you can pick up some really good deals as they want to dump the on anyone who will take...that mall had tons of MCM and I would guess the prices were a bit pricier!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Oh snap, I lived in Cincinnati for about 9 months and totally missed this :-< Oh god, how I miss those mid west opportunities.
    suzy

    ReplyDelete
  7. Oh yes, and thank god for all that mass production. I'm a vintage christmas lunatic, and I thank cute little baby jesus everyday that my ancestors stored all their shiny brites in the original boxes for posterity (and me).
    suzy

    ReplyDelete
  8. I think a lot of it was that people appreciated what they had back then. They had lived through the Depression and took care of their things, because they remembered what it was like to do without.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Looks like the antique mall's I go to in Vegas but I have the same problem, Never enuff money. Friday me and Bob plan on going garage saling in old Las Vegas i'll let you know if we find anything good.

    ReplyDelete
  10. The Springfield Antique mall is great as is the neighboring AAA Antique mall but the really giant Heart of Ohio Antique Mall (about 2-3 miles north) has ridiculous prices. Springfield is the antique mall haven of Ohio.
    Drop me a line next time you are passing through and I'll show you around the thrifts of Columbus.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. AAA has been bought by Springfield Antique Center. When I was there all the AAA vendors were moving out. They're going to put a vintage autoparts mall in AAA.

      Now when you say Heart of Ohio has ridiculous prices do you mean ridiculously high or low?

      Delete
    2. Ridiculously HIGH!

      Too bad about the AAA

      Delete
  11. "We were a better people back then. We weren't a cheap product consuming, planned obsolescence, break it and buy a new one society.

    Too bad we are now."

    Well, perhaps in some respects...but I'd hate to have lived through all the race, sexuality, gender, etc. hate going on back then. I was just listening to a story on NPR about Lilly Ledbetter and how Goodyear had been paying her 40% less than her male counterparts in management for her entire career. Sad. Google "Lilly Ledbetter NPR Slate.com" to hear it for yourself.

    I love that we live in a more open (though obviously still imperfect) and tolerant (and mostly smoke free...I guess that's not very tolerant is it?) society now yet can enjoy all the beautificent accoutrements of the past.

    And that is a B*d *ss antique mall! Now I see why antique mall post at Mr. Modtomic are almost always the most viewed!

    ReplyDelete