A few blocks down past the stadium, through the park, across the train tracks and past the bridge, there's a street with a few warehouses. They are brick buildings, the kind you see in New England towns, you know: mills, old factories. The street is silent and pretty much barren. It wouldn't be surprising to see a tumbleweed coming down the middle of the road.
This building has probably been through a few earthquakes, maybe a gun fight or two, maybe it even caught some seaweed back in the tropical storm in 1939. At one time people probably poured through it like ants; in the morning and then again at night. And now it's just here, baking in the sun.
Downstairs there's a vintage clothing storage place/store called Shareen's. It's like a sort of club house where you can go hang out and try clothes on and sit on huge ratty sofas and eat licorice and drink tea. There are no dressing rooms so you have to just change out in the open, fling your shirt across a water pipe, kick your shoe on the stairs and pretend you live in the wild west or you're going to church in the 1930s or working as a secretary in the 1950s.
Some of the clothing is crusty, stained and almost falling apart from age and use, but it's a real bank for ideas, characters and stories. You can't help thinking about your Gram and Mrs. Featherman and Aunt Nellie and Jackie O.
You should go.
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