Among the unique treasures to be found at Architectural Artifacts on North Ravenswood are a leaded glass window from a Frank Lloyd Wright home and decorative ironwork designed by architect Louis Sullivan.
They will be available for purchase at auction Friday, Saturday and Sunday, May 2-4, at the store's second annual auction. Stuart Grannen, owner, is auctioning off some more of his crazy mixture of unusual items collected from around the world.
"Three day auction, 2,200-plus items," said Grannen. "Selling the store basically."
But this isn't just any store. This is where you get tempted to buy stuff that you might not need for the next thousand years or so. Then again, maybe you do need a pile of old printing blocks.
To some it looks like junk, but as Grannen says, "You know the old adage. One man gathers what another man spills."
And some of those spills are huge, like the 22-foot-tall columns from the old Chicago Mercantile Exchange. You can buy those for about $10,000.
"I had ten of them originally and four went to a vineyard in California," said Grannen.
According to Grannen prices will range from $5 to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"For instance one of the bigger sellers should be this room," he said. "It's a curly maple room, 1913, from a famous jewelry store in Nashville. This should be well into the six figures."
