The Magazine Street Antique Mall

Magazine Street Antique Mall

3017 Magazine St, New Orleans, LA

Lilly Byrne

Local Guide

It was after visiting the Magazine Street Antique Mall with my brother that I realized just how much the store activated my childhood memories and my childlike self. No one on earth can bring out the little kid in me like my big brother can. Being in that store with him was like reliving our childhoods when we used to visit our late grandparents. It even smells like our nana’s house; the aroma of dust, Shirley Temple VHS tapes and her Carolina Herrera perfume saturated the air around us. This is probably the most significant reason that I always choose to come back to this place. It awakens my inner child because I am flooded not only with imagination but also memories. I miss my grandmother dearly, and coming here is like coming to her house as a little girl, looking at faded black and white pictures, trying on her clothes, or admiring her Fabergé egg. It brings out the place attachment I have from my experiences at Nana and Pop-Pop’s house, and it catapults me back to my time spent there. Place attachment as a child can bring about important aspects of adult identity, especially in the form of a sense of belonging. Though I can no longer physically go to their house, this place is the closest thing I have to revisiting them. “Place” can really be anywhere

Dishware and home decor shelf at the Magazine Street Antique Mall

and is difficult to truly define in this context, and since there is such a wide variety of recognizable items in the shop, I believe it has this effect on others as well. It has such an intense emotional effect on me that I tear up just writing about this aspect. The Magazine Street Antique Mall will forever be a place of belonging, and I never fail to have a wonderful experience there.

Stack of books on a shelf from the Magazine Street Antique Mall

The inner child in me is unleashed as she runs rampant through the store. My imagination flows freely, observing every item I touch with an eye of wonder. According to Hebert Marcuse in his work Eros and Civilization, creating these fantasies in my head is one of the most essential ways to fulfill the basic need for happiness. “The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.” (Marcuse). The capitalistic society that we live in works to repress our non-conforming and unfettered selves, but complete repression is impossible. Though I am playing the role of the consumer, the stories I create behind each item belong to my own personal utopia that exists only for me and can never be filtered by society’s standards.

Glass shelves with miscellaneous items from the Magazine Street Antique Mall

I close my eyes and listen as other adults experience the same thing. They walk past, examining the ceramic cow-shaped salt and pepper shakers, the tattered orchestra records from the 50s, the colorful shoulder-padded 80s pants suits. I overhear oohs and ahhs from the women examining the vintage clothing. Close to them is a college student asking her father: “Can I please please get this? I’ll help pay for half of it!” the father almost concedes, but he knows she will never use that hot pink landline phone even if she wanted to. The coolest items are the most expensive, and some of them are even locked inside of a glass display seemingly arbitrarily with no price tag to be seen. Sewing thimbles, golden-rimmed bifocals too small to fit any adult face, and more ceramic salt and pepper shakers! The one downfall of the place, in my opinion, is that there is a twinge of exclusivity in the glass doors. Why must my imagination be limited to what is outside of the glass shelves? At the same time, though, maybe they have locked away just enough so that their customers don’t fall tragically into a vintage coma. Were I to have access to every item, I may get lost in thought and never come back. It is quite the cluttered labyrinth in there. Or, perhaps, they are simply trying to prevent people from stealing the smaller items.

Salt n Pepper shakers, land-line phones, and other trinkets in the Magazine Street Antique Mall

When I came here with my 23-year-old brother, I knew he would love it just as much as I do. Together, we managed to pick up and play with everything we could set our minds to. For about ten minutes he became fully pre-occupied by the less-than-fully-functioning typewriter (a popular thing to touch in the store) as he types random letters and sentences. “Lilly come here! I have to show you this, it’s awesome,” he says, the most excited I had seen him in months. Of course, since I have been here before, I have already typed on the rickety typewriter, but the clicking and clacking of the old timey keys will never fail to be satisfying. I see other people playing with knick-knacks as well, picking up dainty scarves and trying them on, testing old perfumes and subsequently gagging at the ancient smell. I noticed an older man precariously clicking buttons on cameras that look slightly too delicate to pick up, and flipping through “vintage” Rachel Ray cookbooks. This touching and exploring is so conveniently therapeutic, it is almost like a free trial version of play therapy. Play therapy is an integrative form of therapy created for individuals of all ages, but it can be particularly useful for helping adults with complex childhood traumas. I think this could be yet another reason that people gravitate towards this place. There is safety associated with play, and even adults are naturally playful creatures (Olson-Morrison 2017). While it does not have the formality or professional guidance of play therapy that comes with a prescription from a licensed therapist, it provides an expressive outlet that may not hold the same value as mainstream therapy for some individuals. Adults may have difficulty being engaged with another professional adult around, but at the antique shop, there is no underlying embarrassment about it. People are free to touch, feel, look at (most of) whatever they want at any stage in life. That’s the beauty of the store. It is so subtly therapeutic in so many ways that when you walk out you have this sense of happiness that you didn’t know you needed!