Pintchik Hardware: The tangible stuff of renovation

There's plenty to say about Brooklyn's Pintchik Hardware--its limitless expansion, the fresh, free popcorn for you to enjoy as you shop, or even the fact that there's an oracle outside the store.

I think Jonathan Lethem put it best, though, in his assessment of Pintchik in the Fortress of Solitude:

"They walked together to Pintchik on Flatbush Avenue at Bergen, a complex of interconnected shops selling paint and furnishings and hardware and plumbing, a business likely once a single storefront...

...now infiltrated through a block of fronts and lodged below row houses painted schoolbus yellow with PINTCHIK emblazoned in red, brownstones turned into a street-long billboard, brownstones wearing clown makeup.

Something in Pintchik's unmistakable age and specificity, its indifference, made Dylan ache. Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan, as on Dean Street, on Bergen, on Pacific.

Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self. Pintchik pointed only to Pintchik for provenance.

It was a lair, a warren, and the hairy men selling dust-layered shower-curtain rings and glass doorknobs, the tangible stuff of renovation instead of the idea of renovation, from behind the cash registers thick with newspaper clippings, they were rabbits like Bugs Bunny or the March Hare, snug into their hole and only amused or impatient that you might tumble in."

Now that review you won't find on CitySearch.

Happy Holidays, all. The Hardware Aisle will be back in '08.