Art Deco

In its heyday, the Astor Theater in Reading was a fashionable 1920s art deco palace playing host to the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges and Bob Hope. Today, a decade has passed since the last symphony concert filled the 2,200-seat theater; the music has been replaced by dusty cobwebs, peeling paint and the musty chill of neglect and disuse. When Lou Perugini and Newton A. Perrin walk the empty aisles, however, they look beyond the decay and envision the beauty that once was - and that can be again.

From compact studio flats to two-story penthouses with full staircases, two bedrooms, and 2 1/2 baths, the more than 20 floor plans of 1930 Chestnut offer a variety of living styles in a spanking-new environment. The 22-story, historic building (circa 1924), once home to medical offices and Aldine Trust Co., was recently gutted and reconstructed into a residential rental property with 144 apartments and two floors of proposed retail space. Selected units are distinguished by long entrance halls, center-island kitchens, breakfast bars, powder rooms, laundry rooms, skylights and clerestories, lofts and loft-bedroom suites, dining rooms, and dens.

Two major winter sales next weekend will evoke the evolution of furnishings from the Victorian era to art deco. On the way will be a few curios and collectibles. The Victorian furniture will be one of the features at Ron Rhoads' two-day midwinter antiques auction next weekend at the Kimberton Fairgrounds outside Phoenixville. It will be sold at the second session, beginning at 10 a.m. Sunday. Among the major items are a massive three-piece bedroom suite with a 9-foot queen-size bed; a rare walnut 30-drawer beveled glass spool cabinet incongruously capped with a small mantel clock; marble top washstands, and a Victorian Greek revival center table in rosewood.

For years Esther Carroll patrolled the auction and flea market trail, buying and selling. Mostly, she just bought. Eventually her acquisitions exceeded the capacity of the garage at the house at 161 Hartford Rd. in Delran, that she shares with her husband, John. Soon they were scattered around the yard as well. Eventually, township officials got tired of the sight of the possession- filled property and told the Carrolls to get rid of the stuff. Today and tomorrow they will do just that, at an auction at the house to be conducted by Michael Chiaccio, a free-lance auctioneer who normally works at S&S Auctions in Repaupo.

There's a lot more than gangsters in Miami. It's an art town, too. "Streamline Dreamtime" is the theme of this year's Miami Beach Art Deco Weekend Festival, Jan. 14 to 17, scheduled along Ocean Drive in the area that encompasses the city's famous '30s "streamline" hotels that are the essence of art deco: the Cardoza, the Carlyle, the Leslie, the Cavalier, the Waldorf Towers and the Park Central, among others. The area is a federally recognized 20th-century historic district, and it contains the greatest concentration of art deco architecture in the world.

"In setting out your sideboard, you must study neatness, convenience, and taste; as you must think that ladies and gentlemen that have splendid and costly articles, wish to have them seen and set out to best advantage. . . . " - Robert Roberts, The House Servant's Directory, 1827 There are hundreds of types of furniture in this world, and the sideboard is only one of them. Yet, upon close observation, the sideboard - a kind of table containing drawers and cupboards specifically used in the dining room - represents a compact history of changes in domestic manners and taste.

Every time an old building is refurbished in Center City, there's a chance work crews will make a discovery like one the other week at the Jones New York store at 17th and Walnut Streets. And what a find it was: Under a workaday storefront was revealed a four-story art deco facade with terra-cotta pictures of sailing ships, dating back to the Roaring Twenties. By rights, such a building front should be preserved, and preferably restored to its original condition and showcased.

He looks like Sam Spade, dressed in his antique calf-length black coat and department-store fedora. But Paul Fuhrman is not in quest of hapless Maltese birds of prey. His mission is to deliver us from contemporary furniture. He has been stockpiling his arsenal in a former Studebaker garage in Easton. His warehouse is a deco heaven, a veritable supermarket containing more than 300 specimens of American art deco furniture - what he calls "the largest selection in the universe. " His timing couldn't be better.

One of the stalwarts of South Jersey auction houses is the Elmer Auction Co., named after the town in the heart of Gloucester County farmland, but actually located in Monroeville. Every Friday, beginning about 4:30 p.m., proprietors Lana and David Dubin sell furniture, tools, household goods and collectibles. Occasionally Elmer Auction also holds special sales of higher quality goods. Just such a sale is scheduled for Monday at noon, one of many New Year's Day auctions. In addition to oak and mahogany furniture, and art deco items, there is a lot of good porcelain, including Limoges, Wedgwood, Roseville, Rookwood and occupied Japan.

Antiques dealer John Sideli created a market in Catalin radios in the fall of 1983 when he showed his collection of 30 at the Fall Antiques Show in New York and sold them all for $15,000. Before the show, the plastic, bright-colored art deco radios were selling for $125 to $350 on Madison Avenue. When the show opened, their price jumped to $500, and it has been going up ever since. "Those 30 radios are worth $50,000 to $60,000 today and missing were some of the rarities that have turned up since," says Sideli, who bought his first plastic radio 11 years ago for $20. It was a maroon and yellow Fada model 115, a bullet streamliner just like the one he remembered that sat on his grandmother's kitchen table in Brooklyn.

  The Rago Arts and Auction Center is getting a head start on the fall season with a Sept. 1 Discovery auction whose online catalog is already accessible at www.ragoarts.com . As if Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and George Nakashima need discovering. A pair of Le Corbusier hide leather and chrome steel lounge chairs made in Italy during the 1970s are the first of the nearly 1,100 lots in the sale, which begins at 9 a.m. at the gallery, 333 N. Main St. in Lambertville.

From the windows of her fourth-floor office at City Hall, redevelopment director Sandy Forosisky can see the front of 99 Cent Dreams, the 38,000-square-foot value store at the center of what has long been a languishing downtown. Starting in March, that view will change. The Landis Avenue dollar store is slated to be converted into a year-round public market, selling local produce, meat, seafood, specialty items, and prepared food. With it, Forosisky is hoping the city's center will change, too. The $5.62 million project, which Forosisky calls a "mini Reading Terminal," is the foundation for a $59 million city makeover.

There comes a point in the life of our workhorse industrial buildings when we stop seeing them for the marvels they perform, and soon after that, we stop seeing them altogether. In Philadelphia, which abounds with the unused relics of a mighty industrial past, it's all too easy to forget that these are the structures that made the city modern. Such has been the sad fate of the art deco steam plant behind 30th Street Station, built in 1929 by the architects of the rail terminal, with the same progressive ideas and design skill.

Fall is fashion's most exciting time of year. But it also raises the most questions: What's the in shoe? Will belts be important? Are we still in a dress season? So, to guide us, I asked some of New York's hottest designers: Isaac Mizrahi, the man who chic-ified Target and stars in the brand-new Bravo reality series The Fashion Show; Jason Wu, best known for his soon-to-inhabit-the-Smithsonian inaugural gown for first lady Michelle Obama; and Tracy Reese, the delicate hand behind Plenty and her girly self-named label.

Eric Reisman went house-hunting because he wanted a dog. "I really just wanted a backyard," he said. "The house just happened to be attached to it. " Reisman had rented apartments in Chestnut Hill and Fort Washington for years, but on their initial outing, his real estate agent introduced him to quaint Ambler and he fell in love with the first house he saw, a sweet Victorian with an ample backyard that could be his on a limited budget. "I saw great potential in renovating that house," said Reisman, a copywriter who ran his own business for 25 years before joining United Healthcare in the spring.

Foxwoods has become the oldest established permanent floating slots game in Philadelphia. Last fall, it ditched plans for a big-box casino on the Delaware waterfront and announced it would instead set up shop in the Gallery at Market East. Now comes word that the slots operator is eyeing the historic Strawbridge & Clothier building at Eighth and Market Streets. Quick, someone! Calculate the odds on that. They're not as bad as you might assume. This latest switch, though, creates a strange predicament for the Nutter administration.

I love Bombay - or Mumbai, as most Americans probably know it these days. I have roots in the city through marriage, and I've been visiting since 1986, most recently last summer. But these days Bombay is a source of heartbreak, as I have watched familiar landmarks burn in a wave of terrorist attacks. Every time we visited, my family stayed at either the venerable Taj Mahal hotel or the glamorous Oberoi. I've spent hours wandering through the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station, formerly Victoria Terminus or "VT. " One of my fondest memories is asking an usher if my toddler son and I could peek inside the fabulous art deco Metro movie palace.

Everything developer Harold "Hal" Wheeler knows about business, he learned at the bar. That would be his bar, the one Wheeler, now 52, opened at age 20 in the then dicey/funky neighborhood of Adams Morgan in Washington. First lesson: Don't drink the "Golden Goose" - a Wheeler concoction mixing rum, vodka and cognac, and let's say no more about that. Wheeler says he hasn't had a Golden Goose in decades and who is to doubt him - even though his latest proposed project, preserving the Boyd Theater, has been enough to drive a parade of developers to drink.

A Philadelphia developer is wrapping up a deal to buy the shuttered Boyd Theater and says he intends to use the historic Chestnut Street movie palace as the anchor for a $95 million hotel-and-entertainment complex inspired by Atlantic City's Borgata, offering many of the same amenities but no gambling. Hal Wheeler of the development firm ARCWheeler said he had signed an agreement with Live Nation that would enable him to purchase the 2,350-seat theater by Nov. 25. If the sale goes through, it could provide a happy ending to the Boyd's long-running drama.

Le Bec-Fin is planning to move into the 20th century. Saying the decor must match his food, chef-owner Georges Perrier said he would close his Walnut Street French landmark after dinner Nov. 1 for a two-week renovation. And this comes after a four-week, half-million-dollar-plus redo that created its current decor - 19th-century Parisian salon - just six years ago. This time around, Le Bec-Fin's main dining room will go art deco, accented with modern touches, Perrier said.