Ryan Matthew Cohn has more than a few skeletons in his closet.
“I didn’t realize I had an arm in here,” said Cohn, picking the bony remains of someone’s hand and forearm out of a clear plastic crate full of human femurs and humeri. The bones are part of Cohn’s personal collection, donated by medical schools and retired physicians.
“I’ve been collecting most of my life,” said Cohn, who also has a bowl full of human teeth ($5 each) that he bought at an antique dental sale in Pennsylvania. “But as you build up stuff you have to sell it to make room for more collecting.”
What would ordinarily look like an exhumed graveyard was big business at the Morbid Anatomy Holiday Flea Market, held in Gowanus on Sunday.
“People want anything rare,” said Cohn’s wife, Regina, as she stood in front of their table, which was topped with animal skulls and well-worn surgical instruments from the early twentieth century. “People act the same way with designer clothes, but this is so much cooler because it’s so much older.”
Cohn, who starred in the Discovery Channel show “Oddities,” about an antique and rarity shop in the East Village, was only one of the Flea Market’s eighteen vendors, who hawked gopher paws, octopus tentacles, insect-studded jewelry, two-headed stuffed baby chickens, water-buffalo teeth, fiddle-strumming stuffed frogs, a turtle in a jar, mounted antlers, mounted goat horns, and one dried pufferfish. Stuffed chipmunks wearing Santa hats marked the holidays.
Shoppers eager for that drop-dead gift or keepsake waited patiently in line for 45 minutes to sneak a peek at the rare, the beautiful and the creative, or, in this case, the old, the lifeless, and the petrified.
“She’s so beautiful!” said Alyssa Garcia, a Columbia University graduate who had just bought the stuffed head of a doe for two hundred dollars. “I’m an animal lover, and deer are my favorite animal. I’m going to mount this on the wall in my bedroom.”
“It is going to be a very interesting subway ride home,” said her date, Akiva, as Garcia clutched the head to her chest.
Garcia found her doe head among the stuffed birds, fox furs, and painted coyote skulls offered by the New York City Taxidermy Collective. Many specimens were picked off the side of the road, “because otherwise they would just decay or get run over by cars some more,” said Tanis Meyer-Thornton, a red-haired, bright-eyed co-founder of the Collective
While roadkill is one source of inspiration, Meyer-Thornton also dabbles with dead rats and chicks that she buys from reptile feed supply companies, along with the occasional dead squirrel that she finds in the Bronx, where she lives. “Being able to preserve the beauty of anything is a big part of it,” she said.
It turns out that dead things can put a mind to rest. “It’s one of those weird therapeutic hobbies,” said Erin Sullivan, a pet store worker and amateur taxidermist from Stroudsburg, Pa., who wore a locket filled with rodent jaw bones around her neck. “But I would never tell someone at work about it.”
“Ninety percent of people aren’t into this,” said Tom Barndt, Sullivan’s husband, who once helped her carry home a rotting deer head that she could feed to beetles, a common taxidermic technique used to clean bones. “They think it’s gross,” said Brandt. “But to come here and meet with other people is a real connecting experience.”
The first Morbid Anatomy Flea Market was held in June 2014, and it’s become a seemingly undying attraction.
“We probably have around 2,500 people in here,” said Laetita Barbier, the event organizer and librarian at The Morbid Anatomy Museum, a Brooklyn exhibition space for the art, history and science of death. Barbier, who is French, grew up going to the massive flea markets in Paris, where she learned to appreciate the tradition of making cultural artifacts available for people to touch and trade.
“It’s like the whole history of Europe is for sale,” she said. “You can’t really find that experience anywhere else except in a flea market.”
But when Barbier arrived in the U.S., she was disappointed in the local selection. “They would always sell the same mid-century Americana, wood cabin vintage stuff,” she said. “We knew that New York had a lot of weird collectors, so we figured we’d do our own. I love it because it’s a feast for the eye.”
That feast might cost more than an arm and a leg.
“Yeah, I have a pelvis,” Cohn told a customer. “$375!”
