This ribald corner of the Lower East Side was changing so rapidly, stores and coffeehouses seemed to come and go within days. In June, Russell’s store had been flanked by a gallery and a pet shop that had been converted into a café—cages and aquariums still in place. Both had disappeared. Russell and Melanie had signed their lease when rents were still affordable. Desmond never would have guessed that theirs would become one of the most stable businesses on the block.

The store was called Morning in America and the theme was furniture, clothing, and memorabilia from the 1980s. When Russell had announced his plans to go in on the venture with his friend Melanie, Desmond had listened politely. Nineteen eighties style clothing and furniture? He had no idea there was such a thing. As far as Desmond was concerned, the entire decade had been a disaster socially and politically and a personal waste of time. Celebrating it in any form, even acknowledging that it had given birth to a coherent aesthetic, struck him as counterintuitive and politically regressive. Russell’s friend Melanie, a randy, gorgeous dyke from the Midwest, had inherited a basementful of Reagan memorabilia from the right-wing Christian father who’d tossed her out of the house at age seventeen. Russell had been trying to get out of teaching for several years and Melanie loved the idea of using her father’s carefully hoarded junk to support herself in a life that would have made her old man shudder.

Four months after they opened, New York magazine had run a snide item about the shop and it was launched as a destination for out-of-town shoppers and jaded New Yorkers who thought they’d seen everything. A few 1980s icons occasionally stopped in to sign pictures and have their photos taken, Ron Reagan Jr., Shelley Long, and Bernhard Goetz among them.