Woody Allen Meets Sanford and Son

Perched above I–35W on Franklin Avenue in south Minneapolis, on the north side of the street across from the new Wendy’s and the Electric Fetus record store, stands a nondescript, three-story brick building. Who knows how many thousands of people pass it every day, but unless you know somebody who knows somebody in the interior design business, you wouldn’t know that this building holds the most impressive inventory of vintage American office furniture in the country. That interior designers have persuaded Fender in Corona, California, and other trendy corporations to outfit their headquarters with the stuff. And that pieces stored inside also wind up in some of the most tasteful residences around the world.

Up close, the building gives the impression that something might be going on inside. There are tall, grimy windows at street level that used to be storefronts. Some of the windows have been boarded over with whitewashed plywood. Above one there’s faded stenciling that reads Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Book Store. Peering inside, you see a strange crush of objects pushed right up to the inside of the glass. On the 4th Avenue side, one of the windows is filled with doors that have been removed from their hinges and propped up on their sides. Another window is jammed with metal bookcases. Four dusty, sun-bleached upholstered chairs are stacked in another. On the Franklin Avenue side, there’s a window crammed with metal file cabinets with their drawers pulled out and stacked on top. There’s a window with a large metal desk set on top of another. There’s another window full of wooden desks. Another with a caged metal fan, coat rack, round table on wheels, and a red library table with a red chair. Another with live houseplants in big ceramic pots. Another with a vintage gas stove. Another with two plastic molded chairs—one green, one blue.

Above the Franklin Avenue entrance, a red nylon sign reads www.ppf1.com. On the door, a sign says For Deliveries Ring Bell. Sales Office Open By Appointment Only. Another sign explains, inside apologetic parentheses: (Our office is upstairs, so it may take a moment to answer the door—Thank you for your patience.)

PPF stands for Past Present Future, the furniture business owned by an unusual entrepreneur named Steve Mogol. Mogol is fifty-eight and has a full head of tight silver curls. He has long eyelashes, and he squints behind his metal-framed glasses when he smiles. He usually wears jeans and a dyed T-shirt, its pocket bulging with two small notebooks and a pen. His sometimes excited, sometimes hangdog demeanor, plus his discursive speech and often manic gesticulations, make you think instantly and inevitably of Woody Allen.

Mogol does most of his business online via his website, which he believes has changed the landscape of the antiques business. “People used to go knock tires in antiques stores, but now they’re not selling as much as they used to,” he says, anxiously waving his hands. “Because people go online and try to acquire it for what the dealer might have paid.” After hanging out with Mogol, however, you get the odd feeling that he doesn’t necessarily want his customers coming around anyway. You’re not sure, for that matter, he wants to sell any of his stuff at all.

The Franklin Avenue building, which Mogol’s family has owned since 1992, comprises three floors and a basement—32,000 square feet in all. The first floor is divided into eight storefronts, the top two floors into twenty-six apartments, thirteen per floor. The tenants are long gone; these days, every inch, wall to wall, floor to ceiling, is packed with Mogol’s stuff. And not just vintage metal furniture—Mogol has been concentrating on metal furniture for only the past fifteen years. Past Present Future also rents props for movies shot in town (though this part of the business has slowed considerably—Mallrats, Grumpier Old Men, and Fargo are among the last big productions to come through). Mogol also sells art—mostly pop art from the 1980s. His first love was wooden furniture, and he still has plenty of that too. There’s also an entire 1890s mansion—frame, siding, doors, windows, fireplace mantels, floorboards, trim, everything—that Mogol bought in Iowa; he initially planned to reconstruct the entire house, but says now he’s going to sell it piece by piece if he has to.

The metal items are stored on large wooden racks on the first floor and in the basement (they’re either too big or too heavy to be hauled upstairs): desks, credenzas, file cabinets, library tables, bookcases. The brand names are masculine, industrial-sounding, and prominent in the trade: Shaw Walker, General Fireproofing, Steel-age, Stow–Davis, Remington, ASE, Art Metal, Gunlocke. One of the erstwhile storefronts has been converted into a shop, where Mogol’s employees polish and otherwise get a piece of furniture ready to ship. (It’s painted at another site.) Mogol installed a garage door on one of the storefronts and keeps his 1972 BMW inside it.

The second floor is devoted to chairs, hundreds of them, stacked on top of one another from the floor to the nine-foot ceilings. One second-floor apartment is stuffed with Scandinavian–influenced walnut chairs. Another apartment is stacked with upholstered metal office chairs from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. The chairs spill out into the hallway, where they’re also stacked to the ceiling. Vintage metal lamps and fans dating back as far as the early 1900s fill another room. There’s a room crammed with typewriters and electric word processors. Mogol keeps most of his art on the second floor as well: eighties stuff by the likes of Patrick Nagel and Shimon Okshteyn and vintage commercial art, such as lithographs of clipper ships, and a painting of an airplane that belonged to the founder of Northwest Orient Airlines. Mogol’s office is also up here, appointed with a vintage metal desk and a vintage six-by-nine-foot advertisement for life buoys painted on wood.

On the third floor, two apartments are filled with secretary chairs from the 1960s. Much of both floors is devoted to prop rental: There’s a room full of porcelain and ceramic vases, cocktail shakers, ice buckets, pen sets, Crock-Pots, and thermoses. There are dentist cabinets chockablock with beakers and vials. There’s a room thick with vintage clothing, including furs and suits and a pith helmet made in 1947. There are collections of Mogol’s books and magazines (mostly car and business magazines) and even stacks of The New York Times and Star Tribune. “They never quit coming,” Mogol says sheepishly.

Finally, behind a sliding fireproof steel door, is the apartment where Mogol lives—a one-bedroom apartment with a living room and a kitchen. Inside, not surprisingly, there’s a large collection of shoes and clothes—he uses metal lab cabinets to store them—and, under protective plastic, a few pieces of rare, well-preserved aluminum furniture that Mogol considers part of his “personal collection.” He has lived here, he explains, since 1997, when he broke up with his girlfriend of seventeen years. “I can kind of be the night watchman and the janitor, and I’m comfortable here,” he says. “I used to live in a 9,000-square-foot apartment. Now I live in 575 feet and I have 32,000 to run around in.”

Steve Mogol grew up in Los Angeles with really nice toys. Like other kids, he collected baseball cards and model airplanes, but also read the classifieds in order to find the best stuff. “I was kind of particular about design and function and quality,” he recalls. His sense of value seems to have been unusual from the beginning. “I remember reading that P–51 Mustang fighters from World War II—this is thirteen years after the war or so—were selling for $15,000 apiece,” he says, off on a tangent. “I really didn’t know much about what money is. You start learning about money when you’re eight years old—valuing what something’s worth. You learn that a soda is five or ten cents, that a candy bar is ten cents. But I didn’t understand thousands of dollars per se, other than I knew a car cost hundreds of thousands.” He smiles. “You know, whatever. But I told my dad, ‘Dad, the P–51 Mustang is worth $15,000. The motor in it cost $150,000 in WWII.’ See, I knew that. So I said, ‘Here’s something that won the war and ruled the skies of Europe. Wouldn’t that be a good investment?’ ” Mogol smiles again, suggesting that his father, a hard-nosed businessman, didn’t bite on the idea. “They’re worth over $2.5 million today.”

But it wasn’t until his senior year in college that Mogol saw the possibility of making a living based on his eye for antiques. He was studying business administration and history at the University of Minnesota—the family had moved to the Twin Cities, where his father, Bernard, owned the Gold Medal Beverage Company, which he sold to Beatrice Foods in 1971 but continued to run—and during Steve’s senior year he got a job digging trenches for a plumbing firm. “I was making $1.85 an hour because I was like a summer temp, so on Friday I had a paycheck of $125 or thereabouts. One Friday, I stopped at a garage sale on the way home and bought a dresser for ten bucks. Next day, I sold it for $135. In about a half-hour, I made as much as I made during a week of digging trenches.”

After graduating in 1970, Mogol began buying and selling distressed office furniture as well as some Arts and Crafts pieces. In 1976, with the help of his family, he bought a 10,000-square-foot building in St. Paul that he used as a warehouse. In 1985, when the city claimed the property under eminent domain, he needed thirteen semitrailer trucks to haul everything away. “Nobody could believe I could get that much stuff in that building,” he says.

In 1989, he moved his art business to Los Angeles, where he noticed that the market for mid-century modern furniture was beginning to heat up. “But I didn’t have the trucks, and transportation and space were issues, so in 1990 I moved back [to the Twin Cities],” he says. In 1991, he bought a large chunk of his initial inventory at a Ramsey County courthouse auction. Half the furniture he paid for was destroyed, he alleges, because the county needed the storage space for parking. Mogol sued, taking his case to the state supreme court, where he lost. In 1992, his parents financed the purchase of the building on Franklin.

His parents helped him get going, but Mogol swears he paid for his entire inventory. In fact, he says, “most of this stuff has been paid for many times over—because of my leasing business. That’s why [so much] isn’t for sale—because I make more money keeping it. My stuff only gets more valuable. It doesn’t depreciate. Worst-case scenario, I can sell it for scrap if necessary—steel prices are high right now.” Mogol jokes that sometimes when you get something for nothing it costs too much. “I’ll pay a lot of money for a piece if need be, but most of this stuff—there’s more money involved in the labor of picking it up and storing it than anything else.” Granted, he adds, his unusual approach to buying and (not) selling makes people wonder, not least among the wonderers being his dad. Steve says, “Somebody asked him, ‘What does your son do?’ And my dad says, ‘He buys and sells things, but he mostly buys things.’ And the other guy says, ‘What do you mean—he buys things and doesn’t resell them?’ And my dad says, ‘No, he just buys things.’ ”

Mogol, who’s very sentimental, worries that his father, who’s going on ninety, doesn’t really understand or appreciate what he does. “He looks at my success as an account of my financial wherewithal,” Steve says. “I mean, he gets it more today—he can’t deny the publicity that I get or the big projects I get from companies that he knows of—but he doesn’t understand the other part of my feelings about how much I love doing what I’m doing.”

Steve Mogol may truly love what he does, but he’s frustrated. He doesn’t think that he’s where he wants to be yet. He’s had some major disappointments in the past few years. In 2003, a deal to sell restored vintage furniture through Restoration Hardware fell through. Last year, a deal to outfit the new Urban Outfitters headquarters in Philadelphia collapsed. In a 1997 story in Twin Cities Business Monthly, he projected earnings of “close to $500,000” a year. “I haven’t reached that yet,” he says. “I should be at $2 million to $3 million a year. But you have to have factories. You have to have employees. We don’t have a sufficient amount of people working, we don’t have a sufficient amount of space, and the organization needs to be improved, and I guess it all revolves around management. I’m the captain of the ship and it always comes back to me. It’s my fault.” 

Mogol does have employees. A seemingly never-ending rotation of Minneapolis College of Art and Design students mostly, with an annual turnover rate that’s been described as almost 100 percent. His helpers are an artsy-looking lot, some with pink hair and tattoos, some with beards and nose rings, whose duties are divided between transporting the furniture—either picking it up or dropping it off—and restoring it: the painstaking job of blasting, polishing, and painting that each piece goes through. “It took us five years to perfect the process of restoring aluminum chairs,” Steve says. “It’s a very demanding job. It’s hands-on. It takes a certain type of person to do it.”

For many reasons, Mogol believes that the building is less than ideal. He’s tried to buy buildings elsewhere, but he’s been either outbid or “screwed” by condo developers on better properties. “The perfect scenario would be to have a production facility—having the blasting, the wet paint, the particle paint, the woodworking shop, the upholstery shop—all under one roof,” he says. “The offices should be well run. Everything should be at your fingertips. I know how to do it, I just can’t get it done. You’ve walked around here and you’ve seen stuff in boxes, and some of the stuff in boxes has been sitting in boxes for many, many years, expecting to have the boxes moved out of the rooms and the rooms redone and then you can bring them back and put them away. Well, time flies. And you just can’t get to certain things. There are higher priorities. And then you get jobs coming in, and those are always the highest priority. Unless there’s something that overrules it.”

Andrew McInnis, a twenty-six-year-old MCAD grad, worked on and off for Mogol for a year and a half. He describes Mogol as a “father-figure type” with a big heart, but somebody who “can’t get his shit together.” “I never had any fights with him, but I saw a lot,” McInnis says. “And most of it is because of the stress. I would go on long rides with him, thirty-six-hour rides, to pick up or drop off furniture, and he would pack a cooler full of SoBe iced tea and like fifty pastrami sandwiches, and a half-hour out of town he would mellow out. But on the way back, as soon as we hit the city limits, his cell phone starts going off and he just gives off this energy of confusion and he starts muttering, ‘We’re screwed. We’re screwed.’ And, yeah, around the office, we would be constantly losing shit. Phone messages, mail, e-mail messages. Steve would blame people. He would think people were misplacing things. He was paranoid.”

Mogol admits he gets frustrated. “Yes, and since I don’t hear so well, my tone of voice changes and sometimes I don’t know how loud I’m talking,” he explains. “So sometimes when we’re having a conversation and I’m frustrated, it comes off like I’m yelling at somebody. Accidents happen. I’m not getting excited about accidents. I get excited about things that go on that are different than the unwritten policy—stuff that goes on the truck, putting away things, turning out lights, putting away tools, doing something that we’ve done thirty times and we’re doing it like it’s the first time. So it’s organization—the key to success is organization and follow-through. We do almost perfect work, as good as anybody can possibly do it. It takes time. Our clients sometimes get upset. It’s just that anything happens in this business.”

He tells the story about Martha Stewart Living’s art director visiting the building. “She walked through the place twenty-five times in three days,” he says. “Before [her photo] shoot, she confided in me that it was the first time in her life that she saw so much and could have gone in so many different directions that she almost decided not to do anything—it was overwhelming. And every person who has ever been in here—for movies, for design, for anything—everyone is overwhelmed because there’re too many visuals. If you have a good eye, this whole place is made up of stuff that people can be inspired by. If you have a good eye. Most people don’t.”

Not surprisingly, Mogol believes he has the best eye in the business. He believes he has a third eye or a sixth sense for finding good things. “I always find a parking spot,” he says. “It’s uncanny. I can be in downtown Manhattan looking for an ASE desk, and I’ll find a spot for my truck right in front of the building.” Beyond that, Mogol has premonitions—one time, he says, he predicted he was going to be involved in a traffic accident, which he was. Another time, when a friend called from New York, he says he was able to envision the layout of his friend’s hotel room down to the number on the door. “And I believe,” he says, “that this ability helps me in my business.”

Mogol is on a tear now, his free-associating speech overriding his stammer, his hands gesturing wildly. “And it’s not only a business, but I do this as a sport, as a hobby,” he continues. “I enjoy the hunt. I enjoy finding the rare stuff. They don’t make things like they used to. In order to purchase a really high-quality desk today, it’s $2,000 to $3,000, $5,000 for a nice executive desk. And what is it? It’s particleboard with a veneer on it. Forty years ago, it was plywoods and cross grains, hardwoods for the substructures with a thick veneer. It was built to last. Furniture today isn’t. So it has to do with that. I like to hunt. But this metal stuff—some of it was designed by some very talented people, and they never got credit for it, and they made this office furniture that’s simple and utilitarian, and it was reflective of the era in which it was designed, and it’s beautiful. But nobody wants it until I work my magic. There are some purists, but it’s difficult to find somebody perfect, and I guess what I enjoy doing is turning something that’s not beautiful into a beautiful piece.”

Ultimately, of course, this is Mogol’s problem. He trusts his perception of value so completely—he’s so sure that he’s seeing something that nobody else can see, that he’s in control of some ultimate bargain—that he’s often unwilling to let it go at all. His sentimentality overwhelms his business sense. Like most people, he becomes emotionally attached to certain possessions—only in his case the possessions he’s attached to cover 32,000 square feet.

Mogol’s friend Mark Herman, a local graphic designer who has bought several pieces from Mogol over the years, tells about bringing other graphic designers to PPF. “I tell art directors when I bring them over, I say, ‘If you see something you want to buy, don’t get too excited about it.’ But they do get excited because among a certain interior design set PPF is a high-end Sanford and Son. But I tell ’em, even though it’s exactly what they want, ‘If you say, “Oh my God! That’s absolutely beautiful! That’s perfect!”—then Steve will say, “Well, that’s in my personal collection. I can’t sell that.” ’ I’ve seen him do it. Every time. And I’m like, ‘Steve, what is wrong with you?’ ”

Mogol says he plans to clean up the Franklin Avenue building. To move stuff around. To get organized. To open a proper storefront downstairs, where people can look at selections of his inventory and order things. He even wants to expand his private digs. He says he wants to tear down a wall and put in a dining room and outfit the entire apartment with the finest antique metal furniture in the world. Eventually, he says, he wants to create an American office museum. He also wants to design his own library table and sell that.

“I have goals,” he says. “And I’m anxious to get to the closest goals. Three or four years ago, my friend said that I have only fifteen summers left. I think about that once in a while. I’m fifty-eight. I have longevity in my family. But how much time do I have left? I have all the time in the world if I have people to help me. It’s the little forest fires every ten minutes that I’m putting out. I cannot get to the big picture. I’m trying. I’ve done remarkably well. I’ve acquired some beautiful things.” 

Steve Marsh is an associate editor at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine. He wrote about The Smile Network International in the July issue.