The Silk Road Comes to Brooklyn
by Louise Sloan
Frances Baker Caroll, left, and Barbara Baker Clurman mind the store on alternate weeks. (Photo by Dwight Carter)
Though it's just an old storefront on busy, gritty Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, across the street from Bad Apple Bail Bonds, walk through the red lacquer front door and you'll find yourself transported, like Alice through the Looking Glass, to Japan, China, Tibet, Persia. The magic portal is Silk Road Antiques, run by two semi-retired sisters from St. Louis: Frances Baker Caroll, 60, a former high-school math teacher, and Barbara Baker Clurman, 58, a former lawyer. The ancient Silk Road was a series of trade routes connecting the art and culture of the Far East with the West. On Atlantic Avenue, though, the Silk Road is a store and a state of mind.
- Visit Silk Road Antiques and see a video of the Atlantic Avenue shop.
- Explore resources from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival
- See the Asia Society's presentation on Silk Road Encounters
- Review the notes of one classroom teacher who created an online journey for students, colleagues, and all to see.
People from the broad range of cultures that make up New York City come by Silk Road seven days a week. They look at Tibetan bronzes as if in a museum. They drink jasmine tea and leaf through books like Gandharan Art of North India. They trade travel stories and pictures and information about Asian art with the proprietors. Their kids play with the toys stashed in an antique rice basket. They weed the garden and feed the wary "urban fish" that skulk at the bottom of the koi pond behind the store, hiding from the alley cats. And sometimes they even come up with the cash to buy something.
That her business sometimes seems more like a community center is just fine with Caroll. The old Silk Road was about commerce, of course, but also about the exchange of ideas, art, religions and philosophies. "My favorite part about having the shop is learning from the people I meet," says Caroll. "The things we have are a catalyst for that." For example, she says, one customer who is very knowledgeable about Buddhist art and Chinese literature actually translated a hanging scroll that the sisters had for sale.
Caroll stumbled rather serendipitously into the antiques business. An art workshop for teachers at the Brooklyn Museum captured her imagination-and though she loved teaching, she was ready for a change. "I would never do the same thing for 30 years," she declares. Then, over homemade Chinese food in Montreal with her son's friend, an antiques wholesaler now based near Hong Kong, imagination found form. What about an Asian antiques shop?
"I really like art, I really like people, I really like travel," Caroll reasoned. Granted, her only retail experience was a high school job clerking at a 10-cents store when she lived in the projects in downtown St. Louis. But her son was grown, she had a pension and some income from real estate. It was a good time to take a risk. So she bought a building on Atlantic Avenue and called her sister in to help figure out what to do next. Clurman quit her law practice to become a partner in the business. Silk Road Antiques opened in March 2001. They take turns minding the store for a week at a time. On her weeks off, Clurman goes home to Massachusetts. "The store is a magic carpet for us," Clurman says now. "It takes us lots of places."
"It turns out I have a good aesthetic sense," Clurman says. "And I didn't realize how tactile I was," she adds, leaping up from an antique Chinese elmwood chair. "Look at this hand-carved stone Buddha. Touch the shoulder," she commands—it's rough—"then feel the hands, the face, the foot." They're worn smooth from 200 years of people touching them. "That's a lot of hands," Clurman says. "A lot of reverence." Meanwhile Caroll, who has a master's in the hard science of industrial engineering, has learned that she can be moved almost to tears just by holding a beautiful white porcelain Tsung bowl from the 10th century. The Baker sisters were always close, but they have found that they make very complementary business partners. Clurman handles the majority of the sales and the research, and Caroll keeps everything organized, paid for, and running smoothly. "The holes in her head fit the rocks in mine," jokes Clurman. "We're both about as retired as we want to be!"
This article first appeared in NRTA Live & Learn, Spring 2005.
