Greenpoint Journal
It’s the Final Sale for a Longtime Furrier
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Irving Feller, 81, is closing Manhattan Furrier, a fixture on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint since his family opened it in 1916. More Photos »Published: March 25, 2011
The door opened into a space stuck in another century, a dingy, narrow store inhabited for six decades by Irving Feller, his art and his animals on hangers: minks, rabbits, skunks, Spanish lambs and beady-eyed stone martens with tiny claws going nowhere fast.
Robert Stolarik for The New York Times
Mr. Feller instructed Mary Ann Lettieri, 71, to return with cash, not a check, to collect a fur from storage last Saturday. More Photos » “Irving, baby!” Mary Ann Lettieri said last weekend as she burst into Manhattan Furrier in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, relieved to see Mr. Feller back after his shop had been shuttered for months.
“Don’t leave without me!” Ms. Lettieri, 71, shouted anxiously. “My coat is still there!”
The store, a fixture on Manhattan Avenue, Greenpoint’s once-bustling merchant street since Mr. Feller’s family opened it in 1916, is closing.
From the outside, the shuttering of a business as anachronistic as its neon sign speaks to the gentrification of a once-Polish neighborhood now dotted with organic cafes and young artists. The three-story building, with apartments above, has been sold.
But from the inside — cluttered with about 200 furs, a display case of American Indian jewelry, old telephone books, piles of sketches and an antique sewing machine — Mr. Feller, 81, tells a simpler story.
“I know the gig is up,” he said with sunken eyes. “It’s time to leave. You get tired.”
His store, at 685 Manhattan, was padlocked for most of the winter and late fall, the phone disconnected. Customers and neighbors feared that he had died.
“I just didn’t feel like coming,” Mr. Feller said.
Mr. Feller also did not feel like paying the rent, which remained $1,600 a month for years, and so he was asked to leave. After his wife, Selma, died of cancer in 2007, he withdrew and grew frail, his family said.
His daughter, Debra Mintz, 59, has been overseeing the final sales, the last of which will be on Saturday.
“I think he was running away from it, and now he’s O.K. with it,” said Ms. Mintz, an art teacher at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts. “He’s been up and down a lot. He sees it all connected, coming at the end of his life.”
For the past two Saturdays, Mr. Feller has been in his glory, and also in despair, alternately regaling friends and scolding customers as he prepared to pack up his life. He talked of being an artist before becoming a furrier, of being a proud Jew and a friend to young artists. He tried not to think about what was next.
“You do what comes up, day by day,” he said with a shrug.
Todd Eaton, of Williamsburg, bought two of Mr. Feller’s self-portraits in colored magic marker for $20 each. “It’s a shame, everything in Greenpoint is turning into cafes or vintage stores,” Mr. Eaton, 41, said. “It’s nice to see an older generation.”
Mr. Feller said he took the store over from an uncle in the 1950s; a yellowed certificate of ownership dating back to 1953 hangs on the wall. His father, who immigrated from Ukraine and had a fur store in Astoria, Queens, taught Mr. Feller the business.
After serving in the military during World War II, when he designed Army posters warning soldiers about syphilis, Mr. Feller attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and then took classes at the Art Students League in New York. After he married Selma, she gave him $900 from her job as a typist in Manhattan to buy the business.
The couple sewed and hammered the furs, and Mr. Feller painted in his off hours. Only his two most prized artworks remain in the store: an impressionist-style painting done by his mother, Anna, and an oil portrait he did of his wife.
Ninety-seven other canvases he painted from 1947 to 2008 are now stacked in the Greenpoint bedroom of Jennifer Nielsen, 31, an artist from Columbus, Ohio. She said that she would like to organize an exhibition but that she had been occupied the last two years on a documentary film about Mr. Feller.
He and Ms. Nielsen became close friends after his wife died, and Ms. Nielsen even accompanied him on one of his many summer visits to Indian reservations to trade furs for jewelry. “I was drawn to him as a mentor, someone dedicated to his work,” Ms. Nielsen said, taking a break from filming at the store. “It just so happened we both needed a friend in that way. We would talk and draw each other’s portraits.”
But Mr. Feller never sold his Kandinsky-like canvases to major New York museums, though he has a tin full of rejection letters to prove his effort.
“People pay money for fur,” he said. “They don’t like to pay money for art.”
Lately, nobody was paying for furs, either, but he refused to talk finances. “This is about art,” he yelled, “not business!”
Minutes later, Slawomir Kurzyna, who bought the building in September, came by to try to collect months of rent. Instead, after haggling, Mr. Kurzyna left unsatisfied, without any money, but with a 20-year-old blond mink coat for his wife, Alina.
Ms. Lettieri, of Williamsburg, was about to pay Mr. Feller with a check for the silver fox she had stored since 2009. But he insisted on cash, as a faded sign on the wall demanded.
“You need to do it today!” Mr. Feller shouted, before she left to get the money.
“It is an end of an era,” she said, closing the door behind her.
