Woody Allen Meets Sanford and Son

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.”