Sandra McLaughlin lives in a red camper van most days, traveling the country with a pug and a Chihuahua mix as her companions.
She is a reseller — not of antiques, per se, but collectables.
“Glass is my thing. That's what I'm known for,” said the 44-year-old Floridian, who recently drove from Maine to New York, and woke up in Brighton.
She spent the night parked in a line of vehicles on a neighborhood street off Monroe Avenue. All to be one of the first inside what was promoted nationally as the "Sale of the Century."
“Swan-glass vases, compotes, candy dishes, stuff like that,” she said, still talking about her specialties. “But this particular sale had a lot of really nice kitsch.”
McLaughlin secured a ticket for the seventh spot in a line that grew to more than 175 people by the time the sale doors opened at noon. This was Part 1 of the sale, held in late January. Part 2 is this weekend, beginning on Friday. And McLaughlin planned to return.
The sales draw from the estate of the late Anna Hyrcin. The University of Rochester graduate worked in optics at Eastman Kodak Co. and Rochester Precision Optics, and shared in a number of patented inventions.
But she also had an extraordinary eye for vintage arts, wares and other collectibles.
She spent much of her 64 years scouting sales and auctions for rare and hard-to-find items, filling two apartments, a basement and a garage with pottery, comic books, lamps and promotional merchandise.
And kitsch.
"This is unusual to have a collection of this size,” McLaughlin said. “I can go to estate sales and maybe walk out with two or three things that I wanted. But everything in this house is fantastic.”
Flour City Estate Sales is running things, and had to relocate the items in batches to the rented house on Monroe Avenue because the collection is so large. The firm has been in business seven years, doing 75 to 100 sales a year.
This is by far the biggest, and owner Greg Marra said the collection is unlike anything he has seen in decades.
The first sale broke his all-time record for sales in four days, he said, also drawing online buyers from New York to California.
“We have an amazing UFO atomic chandelier. That is probably the rarest piece in this whole house,” he said. “We also had advertising, like we have one of the original signs off of Kodak building number one. … it's in amazing condition and illuminates perfectly.”
He expects there will be Parts 3 and 4 coming up, noting Hyrcin also had a large collection of rocks, minerals and gems.
“We don't know the extent of it yet,” Marra said of the full collection. “I know there's more pottery there. There's more mid-century kitchen items there. There's a lot more ephemera, a lot more books.”
Last month, McLaughlin and other collectors (or resellers) lined up on St. Regis Drive. She parked behind her friend Valerie Wieczorek from Buffalo, who quit her job a year ago and started reselling full-time.
“I've never done this before. I've never camped out,” she said. “I buy storage units and go to auctions. … But I've never done this before. This is crazy to me — like, very crazy."
Wieczorek was as much a spectator on this day as a shopper: “It's like a museum if you, you know, look at the pictures. So we're going to a museum is what I feel like today.”
This was more a chance to spend time with friends. The night before, she and McLaughlin hosted an online auction together.
But McLaughlin was all business.
In some ways, she and other buyers agree, this whole experience is like Black Friday. But you’ve never been in the store before, and don’t know where to go. This time, though, she caught a break, finding old interior photos on a Realtor website and comparing those to promotional photos for the estate sale to create a rough roadmap of where to go once inside.
“It's a lot of detective work,” she said, “before you go in.”
The upcoming sale will be held Friday through Sunday on Monroe Avenue by St. Regis Drive in Brighton.
