As a lifelong enthusiast, collector, and cognoscente of all things big, old, and obsolete... stories like Lenny’s always fascinate me.
Beyond grease and old iron, Lenny, to me, represents a rapidly shrinking demographic of eccentric “old” New Yorkers. The strange ones, those who were doing things long before they were cool; out of step with real estate development and market trends. I’m sure when Lenny bought his garage, it was a ghost town, now it’s prime for condo development. I rode my bike past this garage hundreds of times, and occasionally I would get a glimpse of the contents, but I never realized that they all belonged to one person.
During my Rumspringa in NYC, I met dozens of New Yorkers with similar tales, passionate pursuits, and the tenacity to hold on to that dream, regardless of what the market dictated. My favorite “old” New Yorkers include an eccentric couple in Victorian Flatbush, a man in Crown Heights whose bicycle collection rivals my own, and a sixty year old photographer’s assistant on East 17th st. An afternoon with one of these people was a journey to the past, or perhaps the present, but in a parallel dimension. Disconnected from the mainstream, but keyed into the community and surrounding area on a much different level. To me, that’s where the real New York lies.