Downtown Secondhand Trade

This place is so sweet. When we used to come here as teenagers bored looking for soemthing to do, we would inevitably walk out with some random item which would, no doubt, get chucked away by our parents within a week or two. First things first though — what’s with the name? Downtown? By no stretch of the imagination is this a ‘downtown’ shop — unless you can conveniently forget about the rest of Queen Street and the pit known as the viaduct.
This is the type of place to come when you need an interesting item to decorate your room, or an old vhs, or a sword, or a replica gun — it has it all, but it also doesn’t have that much useful stuff. It all depends what your definition of ‘useful’ is I guess. Worth a browse through.

I watched a documentary about horders, a mental disorder where people become unable to throw things away. The houses of the people with this disorder look a lot like this shop, some of them were quite a bit cleaner. Not the kind of place you would expect to find on Queen Street these days. Queen Street used to have a lot more eccentric independently owned businesses, the majority of which have now been usurped by chain stores and convenient marts. This place would actually make more sense in a suburb, it doesn’t really seem like a place where you might just walk in on your lunch break and make a spontaneous purchase, maybe buy an old sword on a whim. They have some really great stuff though. What they choose to stock is generally very original.

This shop really looks like the home of someone who has just moved in, but someone who has spent his entire life collecting stuff, and now he has just moved into a studio apartment in the city. It is seriously unorganised madness inside. Well actually that’s unfair because most of the items do seem to be organised somewhat categorically.
Anyway, it’s a bizarre place that has quite a random selection of second hand goods for sale; from books, CD’s and DVD’s to artwork to other decorations, appliances to swords and basically anything else you can think of. The swords are so cool and there are heaps of them (actually they were the things that attracted me to the store in the first place). However, I can’t help feeling that everything in here is a little bit expensive for second hand stuff; maybe this is because it’s on Queen Street so the prices are bumped up a little.

First off, the owner here needs to rename the shop ‘Uptown Secondhand Trade’ — lower Queen = downtown, Aotea Square = midtown, K Road uptown — geddit? Anyway, I digress… This is one of those shops where you just walk in sometimes and start making irrational purchases, totally off the cuff. There’s all sorts of random, quirky, weird and wonderful stuff in here, and you just decide you need it! In previous visits I for example have developed a sudden need for various bags, satchels, watches and ceramics. There’s lots of other stuff from there I’d like too but I can’t quite justify it when there are so many things I actually need. At any rate, this is a great place for a peruse — sometimes you just can’t quite believe the treasure you find here!