Walking into Kingston Consignments, you immediately know you’re in a treasure hunter’s paradise. Art, music, vintage tech, furniture, tchotchkes, jewelry, and clothing surround you in a profusion of genres and styles, at a wide range of price points, and the show goes on and on, with rooms full of goodies to explore on each of two big floors. This is retail therapy as it’s meant to be—curated for solid quality and outstanding, evocative character; items that will take you straight back to Grandma’s farm and others that are unblushingly erotic; pieces that will make you gasp in admiration, and others that will make you giggle—all of it presided over by people who enjoy their work.
Owner Craig McElroy says his parents were partial to the occasional good piece of turn-of-the-century furniture or art, but not obsessed. Nevertheless, there were clues. “I was a hyper kid with learning disabilities, and when my parents would go out to dinner I’d rearrange the furniture,” he recalls. “And I always liked going to antique shows and looking at little things. Plus, my friends had a chicken coop that we turned into a clubhouse, and we used to run yard sales.” McElroy mostly grew up in western Orange County, then moved to Virginia when his parents retired down there. “I graduated from Virginia State University in Petersburg with my degree in Hotel Management, and came to New York working and training in the restaurant side of that with a small hotel chain,” he says, “But then the project I’d been hired for fell through and they didn’t know where to put me. So I was back to waiting tables, floundering a bit, when a friend recommended me for a job at Fred Silberman.”
Kingston Consignments is retail therapy as it’s meant to be—curated for solid quality and outstanding, evocative character
It turned out he had never lost his knack for arranging furniture, and he did some solo exhibiting and spent some time working with Howard Kaplan as well before discovering Rhinebeck. And the Beekman Arms Antique Market & Gallery, where he maintained a booth for over a decade. “I was living in the city, but not really doing any of the things people live in the city to do,” he says. “Then I got talking to my partner, Eric Savolainen—he owns Hyde Park Consignments—about a piece he had from Ellenville.
I told him he should sell it across the river, and he said, ‘But I don’t have an avenue over there,’ and that he’d thought about having one, but couldn’t do it alone.”
The seed was planted, and eventually McElroy suggested a west bank venture; the partners scouted locations from Highland on north until they found the former Columbia Beauty Supply, which had been a Front Street anchor for decades. The owner was selling, and the roughly 7,000 square feet of twisty-turny space was just the thing for a business that lends itself so well to exploration. The shop opened its doors in October of 2017.
“I always liked going to antique shows and looking at little things. Plus, my friends had a chicken coop that we turned into a clubhouse, and we used to run yard sales.” – co-owner Craig McElroy
Consignment items fill the front of the shop, while Savolainen manages the booths with a curated group of antiques dealers. “We don’t take everything—there are things we just can’t sell,” McElroy says. “Clear glass, for instance, is a really bad market these days unless it’s Baccarat or something.” Such discernment leaves all the more space for the quirky, fun, and elegant items that do move. Consignment items get a three-month turn on the shelves before being either donated or returned to their owners. When an item does sell, the proceeds are split 50/50 with the consignor.
“People ask me what I buy, and I say, ‘I buy what you buy’,” McElroy says. “And we try to be aggressive with the pricing rather than trying to squeeze every penny out of an item; we keep the flow moving that way, keep different inventory coming in. Most of the dealers we have are really on it too; they’ll bring a few new things in every time they come.”
The antiques dealers—around 25 of them at this writing—are a mix of folks Savolainen has worked with at downstate flea markets and “random people who’ve come in and talked to us and made sense.” The store staff, McElroy says, run the gamut of generations and personalities, drawn together here by a shared love of treasure and its hunters. “We get a lot of compliments on the people working for us, that they’re helpful and gracious, which is nice,” he says. “It’s a random collection of people, and somehow it all just works really well.”
That it does. “Kingston Consignments is our favorite place to be,” writes a recent Google reviewer. “Great stuff, friendly and helpful staff, and some of the best treasure hunting in the area.”
kingston consignments
66 North Front Street, Kingston
845-481-5759
kingstonconsignments.com
