Then He Said Unto Them, Therefore Every Scribe Which Is Instructed Unto The Kingdom Of Heaven Is Like Unto A Man That Is An Householder, Which Bringeth Forth Out Of His Treasure Things New And Old

Any good newsman will tell you some stuff you just can’t make up:

A walk last week through the denuded ex-headquarters of the Times, on West Forty-third Street, was kind of spooky for a citizen already in an apocalyptic frame of mind. The paper’s empty offices, mid-gutting, suggested the twin desolations of war and obsolescence. But in the eyes of the “architecturologist” Kevin Browne, who searches modern ruins for loot, these wastes were full of possibility. Browne had come to the Times Building from another scavenge job (the old Queens County Courthouse — spectacular terra cotta) to look in on some of the spoils he’d been coveting since the Times decamped to Eighth Avenue, last month.

Browne, fifty, is the president of a salvage operation called Olde Good Things, which has showrooms in Chelsea, Chicago, Los Angeles, Florida, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Olde Good Things is owned by the Church of Bible Understanding, a sect founded by a former vacuum-cleaner salesman. For a couple of decades, the church ran a cut-rate carpet-cleaning business that employed teen-age runaways. About a dozen years ago, Browne steered the church into the junk game. “It was totally Jesus leading us,” he explained. In the Lord’s name, he has salvaged artifacts from demolitions and renovation jobs all over town: the Plaza, Alice Tully Hall, the Morgan Library. The Times had already consigned most of its valuable stuff to be sold at auction. Now Browne had a shot at whatever leftovers he could find.

In the front lobby, Browne, a man with a Tommy Chong beard and a loping stride, put on a hard hat and led the way up some stairs to a vast newsroom. “You see anything you like, you can have it,” he said. There wasn’t much to like, just drifts of paper and trash: computer disks, laser printouts of war photographs, a sci-fi paperback (“Earth: Final Conflict — The Arrival”), a lei. Browne spoke into a walkie-talkie. “Junior, those glass doors to the newsroom that said ‘New York Times’ — they gone?” Junior assured him that they were not. “If it says ‘New York Times’ on it, it has value,” Browne said.

. . .

Down at the loading docks, Browne poked around in the back of his van. It was crammed with booty: a pair of oxidized bronze sconces, some antique iron nail pullers, a laser printer. He pulled out a giant black-and-white photograph, printed on poster board, of a Times reporter, in shirt and tie, sitting in front of a typewriter — a real Mohican. Browne had no idea who it was, but he was determined to find out.