They Called It a Dirty Dig.

Anyone can have a garage sale. Just nail a few neon posterboard signs to some telephone polls and haul your unwanted and gently used belongings onto the sidewalk. This was evidenced by the bumper crop of used air conditioners, J. Crew sweaters, Rubbermaid containers and Foreman Grills up for sale this morning. Useful to some they may be, but they don't exactly make for riveting copy. These are the wares of your average household, with the occasional bobble-head Jesus, AC/DC poster or boyequin thrown in for good measure. (That's right, boyequin. Son of mannequin. I saw one today at a garage sale for $10 but the woman selling it seemed very protective of it, so I was scared to take a picture. Hopefully this stock boyequin photo will suffice for illustration.)



These items are here to show us that every typical American family has some skeletons in the closet, from Aunt Agnes's hideous shell art sculpture to the actual $100 anatomical human skeleton I saw in a basement in Lincoln Square. But I mean one per household, and it's sitting next to a nearly-new HP printer and a dresser from Ikea.

It takes a special kind of household to "host" an estate sale. I put "host" in quotes because many times, as people seem to fear, an estate sale only happens once the occupants have died. Some people dislike attending estate sales for this reason; they feel they're picking over the bones of someone's former life. But I consider it a rare and fascinating look into the way a certain breed of people live. Because if an estate liquidator bothers planning an executing a conducted house sale after you die (or downsize, or suffer an illness, or mysteriously disappear so your landlord suddenly owns all your property), you either have to have some really nice, expensive items... or just a lot, and I mean a LOT, of old junk.

If you go to a few estate sales in the suburbs, you'll find they're mostly clients of the former category: elderly with children who live out of town, moving into a nursing home and looking to get rid of an elegant dining set, some Lalique crystal stemware and a Samsung flat screen television. In houses like these, it should take you just a few minutes to browse the sparse, but "shabby chic" upstairs bedrooms, picking out book on Monet or a nice table lamp here and there.

But then there are those sales, most of them in deteriorating two-and-three flats within the city limits, that force gasps from even the most seasoned dealer. "Oh my God," and "How do people live like this," people whisper to their tag sale companions as they wander through labyrinthian hordes of ephemera from past decades, while whoever's running the sale drags from a Pall Mall on the side porch. So these sales aren't pretty, but anyone who's ever unearthed a 545-dollar Bakelite bracelet from the basement of one of these babies can tell you, it may be worth your time to hang out for a while.

So between all the yoga DVDs, cat carriers and and Pier 1 picture frames, Ed and I found ourselvs at one such sale this weekend, and I for one, found it worth my time to stick around a while.



They called it a Dirty Dig in the ad, and on your first step through the cramped door frame you realized they weren't lying. The walls were decorated in that vintage reflective gold wallpaper with the faux velvet accents, which darkened all the rooms considerably. And each room of this two-flat-plus-basement was packed to the gills with collectible plates, framed photos of drag queens, dirty cartoon figurines and ashtrays from the 1970's, old greeting cards, a complete set of Pabst Blue Ribbon pilsner glasses, old wallpaper, ceiling lamps, musical instruments, 45's and movie memorabilia.





It wasn't so unusual. I mean, I've seen packed houses before. But then I stumbled into this front bedroom, which was wallpapered with VHS tapes. Each wall had a bookshelf which spanned its entire width, floor to ceiling, stacked with VHS tapes two deep. This is the kind of room that makes doing this worthwhile.

Here Ed is browsing for VHS movies, his preferred medium.



A true House of VHS.



Believe it or not, there are still many people who use a VCR exclusively to view films. And many of them, like whoever owned this large collection, are real movie buffs who'll pay top dollar to watch a film on VHS, especially when it hasn't yet been released on DVD. These tapes can fetch a pretty penny on Amazon and eBay, so I took out my phone and stared plugging in UPC numbers. The walls were packed so thickly with dense plastic and magnetic tape, however, my scouting tool was rendered useless, so I was forced to type in 10 UPC numbers at a time, then step out onto the porch for a wireless signal to look them up. Even at that slow pace, I found several tapes right away that I could turn around an sell for over $20. In all, I purchased 31 VHS tapes for two bucks each. They have a resale of more than 500 dollars.

But more than just walking away with a fistful of cash, we often leave such sales with a sense of bewilderment, not just at our own luck, but at just who could have lived there, and just what their life could have been like.

Curious?