New and Old #107
Friday roundup and commentary
Why vintage furniture is getting more expensive and harder to find, Washington Post, Rachel Kurzius, October 11, 2022
Auctioneers would rattle off prices from old lecterns that rolled around the floor. But like nearly everything else, that changed in March 2020.
“When we pivoted to online-only sales, we started seeing more and more people,” says Mark Weschler, the auction house’s vice president. “Our sales have exponentially grown — close to 100 percent more than what they were before.”
Not only has the move online opened auctions up to more buyers, it has also expanded the pool of who’s doing the buying. While almost all the furniture used to make its way to brick-and-mortar vintage shops, more of it than ever before is heading directly to private residences or to an ever-growing population of vendors who sell exclusively on Instagram and Facebook Marketplace.
My wife and I bought a bunch of refinished vintage furniture from a used furniture shop in Maryland, when we first got our condo in 2017. It wasn’t cheap, but it was actually cheaper than good new furniture, like Bassett. And it was much, much better quality: the joints, the finish, the hardness of the wood, everything. And with our new house, we’re thinking about buying more. But it sounds like we might be in for some sticker shock.
It’s not so easy for the sellers either:
Getting the good stuff also now requires earlier mornings. These days, Tomasiello prefers to pay pickers to wake up at the crack of dawn for estate sales and deliver furniture to his warehouse, rather than attend himself and risk coming up empty: “If you don’t show up at 4 a.m., 5 a.m. — the sale might not start till 9 or 10 — if you’re not waiting in line that early, you’re not going to get it.”
The fact that the pandemic opened this market up, which had the effect of raising prices, is kind of instructive. Nobody is “doing” that; it isn’t price gouging. It’s just the market. Post-pandemic, it does feel like there are fewer “deals” out there. But that’s because more people are hustling. It’s not bad. But it can be frustrating if you wanted some cheap vintage furniture.
Some travelers told me via Twitter that they will even drive to Philadelphia or opt to take an Amtrak to Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey rather than go to Virginia. Someone wrote: “I’d crawl or swim to PHL [Philadelphia International Airport] before schlepping down to IAD [Dulles] again.”
Well, living near Dulles is nice, and I’ve never found it any worse, in particular, than the awful experience of flying in general. But Dulles is big, and it does take awhile to get around. Maybe I don’t know what I’m missing.
It’s a fun article, and its portrayal of BWI reminds me of the old Avis slogan, “We try harder.”
The End of Computer Magazines in America, Technologizer, Harry McCracken, April 15, 2023
The April issues of Maximum PC and MacLife are currently on sale at a newsstand near you—assuming there is a newsstand near you. They’re the last print issues of these two venerable computer magazines, both of which date to 1996 (and were originally known, respectively, as Boot and MacAddict). Starting with their next editions, both publications will be available in digital form only.
But I’m not writing this article because the dead-tree versions of Maximum PC and MacLife are no more. I’m writing it because they were the last two extant U.S. computer magazines that had managed to cling to life until now. With their abandonment of print, the computer magazine era has officially ended.
If I were a computer guy instead of a land-use guy, I would have written this article. I hope that’s enough to whet your appetite. Read the whole thing!
White’s Ferry is the only surviving ferry, out of what were once around 100, crossing the Potomac River. This one is between Loudoun County in Virginia and Montgomery County in Maryland, serving these days mostly as a commuter shortcut for people who live in Loudoun and work somewhere along Maryland’s I-270 corridor.
It looks like this:
But it’s also used by, and valued by, folks in this rural corner of Montgomery County, which is part of the county’s very cool Agricultural Reserve:
“It’s the heart of our community,” says Link Hoewing, a longtime resident of nearby Poolesville. “The ferry actually is our main street, when you think about it.”
Just over two years ago, that heart suddenly stopped beating, the victim of a quirky and complicated legal battle between two entities that aren’t just on different sides of the Potomac River that the ferry used to cross, but also in different states.
White’s Ferry is a very cool piece of living history, and the legal issues are tricky and not entirely clear to me. I hope it sails again.
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A couple of good ones here!
First the demise of printed computer magazines. I was a computer guy for my second career as an IT guy at NASA and was a faithful subscriber to a number of publications (I saved the last printed edition of PC Magazine!). Since that career spanned the transition from print to online, I have really mixed feelings about it. There is a much wider variety of information out there so you can almost always find the very specific thing you are looking for, but that comes at the price of a lot of crap that you have to wade through, mostly stuff of very little value because it was published to make a quick buck as a scaffold for advertising. While the web certainly has democratized (really disintermediated) the information flow, that removed the often very valuable curation that print publications provided and since there was fairly vibrant competition in the space, it didn't get stale. But to paraphrase the parable of the Chinese farmer - is it good news or is it bad news? It's too soon to tell.
Second, I'm also a long time bike rider and I really wish the brouhaha over White's Ferry would get worked out. Beyond the historic value and for some commuters, it's a fantastic resource for bike riders as it adds some interest and a deviation from really busy/far apart river crossings for riding in the area and is (was) heavily used by touring cyclists. Being interested in the subject, I have tried to follow it in detail and read as much on it as I could. It's been a while, but my impression is that it's not clear cut and there certainly are special interests being plied here. That said, the last thing I remember was some nominal increase in the fare was proposed, but rejected and that seems silly. We pay huge amounts to cross other bridges (been across the GW bridge in NYC recently? $20) so given the limited use and complexity of operating this old Ferry and its value for the users, why not pay more. I certainly would. And who cares if some adjacent land owner is making a buck (or three). Welcome to the USA!