Old $1 million coin at new Marina store
Former Lombard pancake house turns into site to buy rare currency
They’re not selling pancakes anymore at the old pancake house on Lombard Street in San Francisco.
They’re selling things that go for $1 million. They’re round and golden, and look like small pancakes but are not priced like small pancakes.
The old International House of Pancakes just reopened as a rare coin store, the biggest in the Bay Area. The roof is still pointy. The bathroom is still in the same place. The faded sign in front still says pancakes but good luck finding one.
“Welcome to Witter Coins,” said Dustin, the armed guard, who doesn’t open the doublelocked front door until he sizes you up, which is something they never did when the place was a pancake house.
Inside are case after case of metal discs. Some are shiny but the most valuable ones aren’t. Some you can hold in your hand and flip, as they do at the beginning of the Super Bowl. But the most valuable ones you can’t, as you would risk getting oil from your fingers on the coin.
“That would not be a good idea,” said store owner Seth Chandler, who has been collecting coins since he was in grammar school and who hands out old pennies to kids who come in the store, as if strewing seeds. You can never tell when a penny might take root and turn that kid into the kind of grown
up who will pay $1 million for the 1855 gold piece on display in the front case.
Chandler sold it to a Bay Area collector some weeks ago. It’s one of 14 gold coins minted by the Kellogg assay house in San Francisco during the Gold Rush when the new San Francisco mint could not keep up with demand. On the back of the coin it reads, “Fifty Dolls.” San Francisco was a busy place back then and they didn’t have time to spell everything out.
Chandler said he gets to keep the coin on display for a while, to celebrate the store’s grand opening.
The $1 million coin is not for sale, but plenty of sixfigure coins are.
In addition to the free pennies and the $1 million gold piece, Chandler has got nickels for $200, dimes for $26, quarters for $350 and half dollars for $500 and up — mostly up. None of them is for carrying in your pocket and buying stuff with. Most highend coins are “slabbed” — graded by professionals and encased in clear plastic holders, where they can never be felt, fondled or flipped.
Flipping a coin or carrying one in your pocket is a terrible thing to do, Chandler said, and so is making it shiny with metal cleaner. No serious collector cares if a coin is shiny. Cleaning a coin damages its features. Chandler must regularly break the bad news to widows who bring in for appraisal their late husbands’ old collections, newly spruced up, that the metal polish knocked a coin’s value in half.
It was then that Dustin the guard unlocked the door and in walked San Francisco hotel owner Goldeen Sanford with a briefcase full of coin albums that he’d been saving since he was a kid and that he had decided it was time to part with. The Witter staff grabbed their loupes and began studying the heads and tails of scores of Indian head pennies, although they did not call them heads and tails. They called them obverse and reverse.
“You have some really cool coins,” Chandler said, bestowing the highest compliment he hands out.
Sanford’s face shined bright, even if his pennies didn’t. Sanford said he had been in the building countless times before, for breakfast.
“I do miss my pancakes,” he said. “Whoever thought a rare coin store would end up here?”
The two men would talk turkey later, in the back room. In coin stores, important things take place in the back room.
Coins for buying things may be on the way out, Chandler conceded, as society becomes more and more cashless. And newer “collectible” coins cranked out by the zillions by the U.S. Mint are generally poor investments. But scarce old coins for collecting, he said, are different.
“With a coin, you’re holding history in your hand,” he said. “A society puts its highest aspirations and its greatest leaders on its coins.”
In that regard, rare coins may have an edge over rare postage stamps. Take presidents, Chandler said. Guys like Lincoln, Washington and FDR made it to longrunning coins — some worth a small fortune. Guys like Warren G. Harding, Millard Fillmore and Richard Nixon made it to shortlived stamps — none worth much.
Even more valuable than some of his coins, Chandler said, is something else Witter Coins offers. There is a small parking lot left over from the building’s days as a pancake house, with 12 spaces. In the Marina district, free parking is nearly as rare as an 1855 gold piece.
“It’s only for when you’re in the store,” Chandler said. “Unless you buy a $1 million coin. Then you can park all day.”
“With a coin, you’re holding history in your hand. A society puts its highest aspirations and its greatest leaders on its coins.”
Seth Chandler, store owner