From dozens of antique shops, this street is down to one

SAN DIEGO -- Ask Dave McPheeters, 75, to introduce himself, and this is what he says.

“I am the owner of Zac’s Attic. I am the last man standing on Adams Avenue, the original Antique Row.” A pause, a breath. “So I’m kind of a dinosaur in this business.” A laugh.

The word dinosaur comes up more than once. The second time, he uses it to describe his taste: “I’m a dinosaur. Like I say, I do things old school. My taste is old.”

For generations, old sold. People would visit multiple antique shops in a single day, so much so that they turned the noun into a verb — antiquing — the ultimate sign that something has gone mainstream.

Today, verbs to describe shopping for heirloom or vintage items include googling, craigslisting and eBaying.

In this much changed world, McPheeters has more than hung on. His business outlasted the pandemic, the global financial recession, the ascendance of e-commerce and other economic turning points. It has also outlasted the other shops that once lined Antique Row in Normal Heights. And it did so despite having no website, no internet presence of his making, no TikTok page.

He sat in his shop on a recent Friday morning surrounded by cut crystal wine glasses, bronze and silverplate candelabra, dishes like your grandma’s grandma might have owned, and enough vintage Hawaiian shirts to dress a Tiki convention, and smiled.

“There’s a certain amount of pride,” he said, in being the last man standing. Also, a certain loneliness. “I wish there were more shops in the area because, like, in the old days, it becomes a destination where people can shop. And I don’t mind competition at all.”

His wife asked him to retire at 70.

“She gave me a five-year reprieve. That ran out in January,” he said.The beginning

McPheeters has been selling antiques for almost 60 years. He started as a teenager, in 1966, in Old Town, where he worked in two shops. Then he opened his own, ultimately owning three shops there at one point. The foot traffic was amazing. So many tourists.

Decades later, new landlords in Old Town abruptly ended one lease, then another, and his antique dealing friends kept telling him to move to Adams.

“Oh, business is great. You need to come up here,” they said to him.

He considered Del Mar and Coronado but let himself be persuaded. In 1999, he moved 5 miles east and reopened Zac’s Attic half a block from 30th Street. Weary of leasing, he bought a fixer-upper craftsman that seemed destined for demolition, then renovated and restored it.

“People thought this building was going to be torn down and become a parking lot,” he said.

The previous business had sold, what else, antiques.

Back then, the neighborhood was down-to-earth and priced accordingly. There were 11 bookstores, at least one upholstery shop and a mix of cafes and dive bars. McPheeters said there were 24 antique and thrift shops on Antique Row at the peak, based on an old marketing brochure map.

According to another shop owner, there had been as many as 35 in the mid-1980s. That is what he told the Evening Tribune. The man, Lloyd Davies, opened the first antique store on Adams around 1960. He also introduced the idea of an Antique Row.

“They asked me how I could have an antique row with only one store. Well, I could see the future,” Davies said in 1985.

In 1986, a newspaper profile of another Adams Avenue merchant who specialized in military memorabilia described Saturdays as busy, with customers “elbow to elbow” in his store.The middle

One of those two shops now sells tattoos. The other is Cal Coast Bicycles.

Dozens of stores, down to one.

That store is open weekends only, down from five days a week before the pandemic. McPheeters let the staff go, because with other antique stores gone and sidewalk strollers more rare these days, it didn’t make sense to keep paying wages given what he was earning. He also runs estate sales, travels to trade shows and does appraisals.

Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach has fared better. A large antique mall was pushed out in 2018 for a Target, and tenants change, but more antique and vintage shops remain there than on Adams.

Membership has been falling in the Art & Antique Dealers League of America, which counted 100 members in 2016, 86 in 2019 and now lists “70 plus.”

Written as a sentence, this change is abrupt. But in real life, it took decades.

The possible reasons why antique shops have folded are many. Internet. Rising rents. Changing tastes. Changing values. A pandemic. Flat pack, disposable furniture. A more transient society.

“If they don’t have a firm place to live, (if) they’re not buying their forever home at 24 or 30,” McPheeters said, “they’re not decorating that to live their entire life in. They’re apartment dwellers and they only have so much room. And if their job takes them out of state, that’s why they buy Ikea. Because they can leave it behind.”

In 1999, McPheeters was interviewed by this newspaper about e-commerce. “As an antique dealer, I get sick and tired of hearing it,” he said then. “eBay, eBay, eBay.” That marketplace was 4 years old and already tearing into brick-and-mortar, mom-and-pop shops.

He planned to add a digital storefront. “Eventually I’ll be online,” he had said.

He never did. “I know it’s a necessity in today’s commercial world, but I just stay so busy, I don’t find the time do it,” he said.

Another longtime San Diego antique dealer, Jim O’Connell, opened a shop in Mission Hills in 2000. He agreed the internet turned everything on its head, with people typing something into a search box and finding hundreds in an instant. He remembered prices for antiques taking a nosedive.

He described McPheeters as “a nice guy” and “a hard worker. I’ve always liked the selection that he has, when I’ve entered his store. He’s got a good eye.

“I sort of feel sorry for fellow antique dealers here in San Diego,” he added. “Because I know how hard they have had to work to survive, let alone make money.”

To succeed, O’Connell said, “You’ve got to be capitalized, and you’ve got to have taste, and you’ve got to have a passion for what you do,” he said.

O’Connell plans to close shop and lease out the store within a year. Auctioneers recently carted off a semi-truck of items. “I’m 72 years old, and it’s what we call a nonproducing asset,” he said. “I’ve been trying to close for the last 10 years, but it’s my partner’s passion.”

Rents have also driven shops out of business or out of the neighborhood.

The second to last member of Antique Row, a furniture consignment shop, closed in 2015 when the landlord doubled the $1,500 rent, SD News reported.

In 1999, when McPheeters moved in, a nearby office, about one-third of that size, was going for $900 a month, according to a classified in the San Diego Reader. Today, down the street from Zac’s Attic, a 3,614-square-foot vacant retail space next to Lestat’s coffee house is advertised on LoopNet for almost $7,050 a month.

“Depends on what you sell,” McPheeters said, when he learned of that sample rent. “You can sell diamonds out of 200 square feet, but if you’re selling the kind of thing that I am and your average price point is under $50, it’s hard to hit those numbers.”

McPheeters preferred not to say publicly what he paid for his shop. The median price of a single-family home was around $200,000 in 1999, and his was a fixer-upper in an up and coming neighborhood. Buying that building is what keeps him here, today.

“Smartest thing I ever did,” he said.

As for trends, he noted that furniture these days moves slowly. “I used to do a lot with Depression glass, and now they want Pyrex bowls,” he added.

Trends come and go, and as a dealer he evaluates people’s estates and resells them. Uranium oxide glassware, which glows under UV light, is hot now. But he looks beyond trends, or through them.

“It’s a matter of taste,” he said. Also, knowledge: recognizing an original versus a knockoff.The end?

Though Antique Row’s shops have closed, plenty of people still buy secondhand. At the estate sales he runs, hundreds of people will stream in over a couple of days.

Reusing is sustainable. Old fads spring back to life. Depending on how federal tariff policy and the U.S.-China trade war evolves, people might source more things locally, whether new or used.

And while there are fewer independent shops run by experts, there are still plenty of places to shop: vintage and antique malls with vendor stalls, consignment and thrift stores with everything from cheap FTD flower vases to valuable quarter sawn furniture, as well as traveling trade shows and, of course, the internet.

About Zac’s Attic. McPheeters named the shop after his first son.

“I liked the alliteration of Zac’s Attic,” McPheeters said. “It falls off the tongue easily.” That child is now 37, and he “has no interest in the business whatsoever. It’s OK.”

Both of his sons have their own careers, and McPheeters hadn’t really thought of a succession plan. But a new pressure on his business is making him consider what comes next.

An apartment building with more than 70 units recently opened across the street, at 2911 Adams, replacing a small, one-story building with a parking lot. The developer’s CEO last year said its projects aim to provide quality housing for “military workers, health care workers, police department,” fire fighters and city staff.

But it has very limited parking. That leads people, who McPheeters suspects are the apartment’s residents, to park all day at the meters in front of his store on Sundays. The lack of street parking on a prime weekend shopping day is an existential hit, he said.

“I get calls from people who want to come into the shop and they said, ‘We’ve circled the block four or five times and you can’t find parking. So I have to try you another time,” he said. “I don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer about that, but that’s a reality that I kind of have to face.”

What about his new neighbors, do any of them stop in?

“I’ve had a few,” he said. They don’t buy, but they’re curious enough to take a peek inside the last antique shop on Adams.

Ask McPheeters how he did it — all these years — and this is what he says.

“Just persistence. I just stay with it. Because I love it. Every aspect. I miss it when I’m not in the store, when someone else has to mind the store. I love interacting with the customers. I obviously love buying. It’s really, really hard for me to stop.”