Bernal Heights:
Mega-sale offers deals with appeal
They came to score a deal. They came to honor tradition. They came for the rubber elephant heads.
On Saturday, hundreds of hopeful shoppers descended on one of San Francisco’s oldest and least-known neighborhoods, Bernal Heights, where 150 families had cleaned out junk from the deepest recesses of their closets and garages to palm it off on others for a buck.
The annual neighborhood garage sale had record participation this year, raising more than $3,000 for the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center at 515 Cortland Ave., said organizer Michael Minson.
But charitable giving was not why people prowled the 176-year-old neighborhood of tightly packed Victorians on this warm and overcast day.
“Should I buy this?” Benjamin Hobson, 32, asked his dad as he tried on a rubber elephant head for sale at Nick Brinkley’s house on Andover Street.
Scott Hobson scrutinized his son. “Too Republican,” he said.
They walked on. Brinkley watched them go.
“People have bought a few things, and I’m like, yay!” he said.
There is indeed a sense of triumph if you can sell someone your old leather fringe jacket ($20) or your brass statue of Romulus and Remus being suckled by the wolf ($2).
Brinkley, unfortunately, could not. His fortunes appeared to grow even grimmer when Clare Simmons, stopping by with her family, peered at the goods on his front steps and declared: “We live behind you. You don’t want us to buy this trumpet.”
Brinkley considered. Forty dollars is, after all, forty dollars.
Then Giles Brown, Simmons’ husband, spoke up: “I’m definitely tempted.”
“Oh, are you?” said his wife, as Brown plucked the aged horn from its case, brought it to his lips and blew. If he had been wearing the elephant head, it might have been a call to stampede.
As it was, the blast startled his child, swathed in a pink tutu, who jumped up, turned, smacked into a stranger, then recovered before running five steps and falling to the ground in shock.
“That’s my son, Matthew,” Brown said, returning the trumpet to its case. “He’s 2.”
Across the street at Will and Taylor Schindler’s house, Chester Cheung, 57, bought a pack of command strips, batteries, a compass with a whistle attached, and a Wonder Woman Pez dispenser. He spent $3. He would have bought the set of Star Wars Pez dispensers, but during the five minutes he, his wife, Araceli, and daughter Veronica turned their backs, someone else snapped them up.
“It’s hit and miss,” Cheung shrugged. “You get used to that.
The Cheungs have been coming to the garage sale for years, picking up books, Barbies, electronics and the family’s prized china cabinet.
Beyond selling the little stuff, the Schindlers hoped to get rid of a futon, a child’s bed and a pet tent.
“We need to make room for more stuff,” said Taylor, 35. “Purging, accumulating, purging, accumulating.”
Will, 28, said: “We’re Americans!”
Down the block, Edie Williams and Juan Vargas hoped to sell a sevenpiece Louis XV bedroom set of avodire wood from 1940 that Williams inherited from her great-aunt and described as “froufrou.”
It’s not known what “Antiques Roadshow” would say about it. But Williams wanted $1,000 and wasn’t getting a bite.
Walter Schirra, 65, gazed into the large mirror of the set’s vanity and shook his head. “I’d break it,” he said. “I’m looking for smaller items I can sell on eBay.”
He wasn’t the only one. Graham Rios, 39, drove up from San Jose to score items for the same purpose. He bought drumming instruction DVDs from Williams and Vargas for $2 each.
“I’ll probably sell them for, like, $10 each,” he said, noting that he earns more each year on eBay than as a business consultant.
Meanwhile, back at Brinkley’s house, Erich Schneider, 43, tried on the elephant head.
“I already have a rubber deer mask,” the computer programmer said. “It’s great fun in the wilderness.”
He gave Brinkley $5 for it.