EVERETT – Jeff Garner would like you to stop by to see what’s new at his antique mall.
Garner is the owner of Grand Central Antique Mall, which occupies the top floor of the Everett Public Market Building at 2804 Grand Ave.
The business is still recovering from an April fire that started when a lit cigarette tossed from an adjacent apartment building landed on a window sill.
The fire burned out the space where two of Garner’s tenants had set up displays. Sprinklers stopped the flames before they spread further, but they also poured thousands of gallons of water into the shop – ruining merchandise, carpeting, insulation and fixtures.
It’s been a long road back, Garner said.
“I’m real pleased with the way it turned out,” he said last week. “If you had met me six months ago, I might not have said that.”
Grand Central has been in that location for about 20 years, under different owners and different names. Garner worked for the previous owner and bought the mall in the early 1990s after being laid off from Boeing.
Garner rents spaces to antiques dealers, who provide their own inventory and set up their displays. Garner and his staff take care of customers and ring up sales for an 8 percent commission.
“Dealers can set up their space and leave, and hopefully they’re out there finding more inventory,” he said.
About 70 of them have displays in the mall, which covers about 13,000 square feet. Most dealers are in it part-time or are retired, he said. Only a handful are able to make a living at it, and “they tend to be single, and they tend to spend a lot of time on the road.”
“This will be fun, but they won’t turn into Bill Gates doing this,” he said.
Garner thought he would be out of business entirely after the fire. The recession and 2001 terror attacks already had taken a toll on sales before the fire.
The mall’s doors were open on April 27, the day after the fire, and a few customers wandered up the stairs – mostly to commiserate, although a few bought things, Garner said. “That first day, we did $300 to $400 in sales.”
But after that, the business had to close while crews tried to dry out the building. After a week, Garner said he told the landlord that “if we stay closed any longer, there won’t be much point in opening,” he said. “There were days I was up here, I was like ‘I don’t know.’ “
But “a lot of the dealers rallied forth,” he said. With the staff, they moved displays around, and got new carpet and ceiling insulation installed.
Four of his dealers left immediately following the fire, and four more in the slow months that followed, Garner said. But the remainder stuck it out.
“After the fire, it was up and down, up and down,” he said. “For a while there, we’d have a good day, and then we don’t know where they (customers) were, but they’d disappear.
“It’d drive you crazy,” he said.
Garner said he “swallowed hard” and paid the bills to keep marketing the mall, including direct mailings to former customers, and last week it hosted a “customer appreciation night” for them.
Dealers have worked together to make the whole mall more attractive, he said. “Anything that we can do that we think will make an eye-catching display, we’ve done.”
And it’s starting to work – just in time for holiday shopping, Garner said.
“Our foot traffic has improved quite a bit,” he said. “Business is getting better.”
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