Philadelphia's Antiques Row in transition

Ted Kirk draws deeply on his cigarette, rests his elbows on his splayed knees, and takes a long, sad look around. He is sitting in the once cluttered, now scavenged, showroom of his brother Jack's antiques shop in Center City. Hardly anything is left, other than a few cardboard moving boxes, a couple of dusty rugs rolled up like stogies, and some orphaned leaded glass windows.

"My brother was a fixture," Kirk says. "He had his store for 40 years."

Ted is not sure how long Jack's shop - Antique Design - was on the 1100 block of Pine Street. Long enough, though, for his brother to have watched the lights snuffed out like gaslights, one by one, along Antiques Row.

On Aug. 16, when Jack, 62, died of cancer, Ted, a septic tank contractor in Florida, was left with the daunting job of clearing out the remains of a formerly thriving enterprise.

"Business had been slow, like for anybody in the antique business," he said.

The store is about to close, leaving yet another hole in this once lucrative and legendary retail district.

A few doors down, Kohn & Kohn Antiques, established 1932, is holding a liquidation sale. On the corner where, back in 1956, Albert Maranca started selling fine 18th and 19th century European furniture and decor, a sign advertises 70 percent off whatever stock is left until the doors close for good, sometime in October.

"I'd say things started to go downhill in 2008," said Dee Wolf, who used to run two antiques stores on Pine Street. After 21 years in business, she gave up and is now helping clear out Maranca's store.

After Albert died several years ago, his nephew John Christaldi took over. Now Christaldi has decided to cut his losses.

So the pair of eight-foot high bronze angels carrying a $16,000 price tag are now available for $6,400. The estate-sized Italian Rococo mirror is a steal at $4,800. And in the corner, a magnificent rectangular marble table top is waiting to be taken home for a mere $275.

Nationally, the antiques trade has bumped along with periodic reports of declines and recoveries since 2003.

Last winter, John Smiroldo, founder and publisher of the bimonthly magazine Antiques and Fine Art, told the New York Times that "collectors are going after A-level material . . . but you can get A-minuses for pennies of what it will be trading for in four or five years. As far as I'm concerned, American furniture is free right now - for killer stuff. And high-style English furniture is down, down, down."