Far East Corner

In the middle of running around town today I noticed that a little boutique called The Far East Corner has opened up in one of the five retail spaces which have been empty for years on the first floor of Arlington Towers. Here's a shot from just inside the door:

I was intrigued and happy to see someone putting this space, empty so long, to some good use. After wandering around for a few minutes I came upon what looked like an ornate entertainment center. Despite my fiddling with the cabinet doors I was finding it impossible to understand how to open the large center compartment wherein it appeared that a large-screen TV would fit nicely. I assumed I was wrestling with a decent-looking but cheap piece of furniture of the mass-produced sort, something you might find at Cost Plus or maybe Pier 1.

"Is this an entertainment center?" I asked the owner.

"No, it's a kitchen cabinet. That's why it has so many open-air compartments." She replied.

I was slightly confused. It was a nice-looking piece of furniture; who would want or need to put it in a kitchen where someone's just going to spill Coke on it?

"They used to like to store things this way." she added, "This piece is 160 years old."

And suddenly I couldn't have felt like a bigger hick. As it turned out I was fidgeting with a 160-year-old gorgeous piece of hand-crafted artistry created halfway around the world some time just before the American Civil War, and here I was trying to figure out how the heck you're supposed to stick a TV in it.

I hope this little boutique succeeds, and more than that I hope it's the start of a trend. It's a small piece of the gentrification that has been lurching forward in fits and starts in downtown Reno these last couple of years. Revitalization is proceeding at an agonizingly slow pace but it is proceeding nonetheless. Right now it seems strange that this little store exists in a difficult-to-see corner of Arlington Tower in a neighborhood which at first glance definitely does not appear to be the sort of place one comes to find unique, rare, expensive furniture. My hope is that a year or two down the road it will not seem strange at all. No matter what one may think of expensive Chinese antiques, from where I sit it's classy, not to mention a hell of a lot better than empty space.