Behind hidden doors...

One of the main draws of New York City are the Broadway shows. So the first thing that we did when we arrived at the Hotel Pennsylvania across the street from Madison Square Garden was to ask at the ticket desk whether any of the great shows like Spamalot or Chicago had tickets available for Saturday evening or Sunday. They came back with a bunch of offers for shows that sounded like they had finally put the music of Brittney Spears into a musical (actually that would be pretty cool). So Sarah and I checked into our non-smoking but smoke ridden coffin of a room, the door looked like the entrance to a mausoleum, and opened the window to air it out. We then rushed back downstairs to where James and Stephanie were waiting for us in the car so that we could go to the other major attraction in New York city – illegal knock-off bag shopping. I better get used to the world of designer bags since I am going to have a daughter.

After parking in a faux little Italy in SoHo we walked the fifteen blocks in a sudden torrential rain shower that was a good change from the hot 90 degree weather. We did manage to buy two umbrellas for the four of us and I had to hold the one for Sarah and me because I am the taller one. I tried to cover mainly her because she is pregnant and might dissolve in the acid rain of New York.

Upon arriving at Canal Street we began the quest for the knock-off bags. As someone who doesn’t understand bags as a fashion statement I mainly was there as a consultant on illegal activities and getting into trouble, which I am better expert for. I was also the only one who had seen the illegal bags before so I was an expert on the process. My former experience was in the winter of 2003 during a massive blizzard that buried the PT cruiser for a week. In 2003 the shops had giant rooms full of knock-off bags. During that blizzard there had been one incident when we were in a big store full of bags and the police came past and the store had completely closed with us trapped inside for five minutes before some fashionable and Jewish looking fashion label enforcement police had busted into the door and started yelling at the proprietors. Times had changed and the stores were tiny and brandless so I figured that either the Internet bust had broken down demand for these bags, the shops shrunk in an inverse proportion to the temperature, or the crack down by the Prada police was taking it’s toll on the industrious Nextel phone and walkie-talkie wielding immigrants of Chinatown.

So we entered a number of these smaller establishments and looked at their bags but unlike the last time I was there the bags didn’t have any labels on them to identify that they were Prada, Kate Spade, Gucci, or Coach. You had to know the style before-hand to figure out which was which. Sarah was quite unimpressed and was looking for a black Kate Spade diaper bag and would settle for nothing less. You have to have standards in these things. We entered a number of shops with all four of us but the bags just weren’t the knock-offs we were looking for. Disappointed we split apart for a while. James and Stephanie ate Lychee nuts. One industrious illegal bag salesman popped out of a basement door bulkhead and started waving a catalog of bags in front of a fashionable teenager in front of us. Sarah walked past and let me know that she didn’t want to go down into a bulkhead to buy a bag. We then found Stephanie and James wandering in a daze and since the heat had returned we stopped into the local Chinatown Hagen-Daaz outlet for some smoothies because James and Stephanie couldn’t find the place that had the perfect Boba-tea drinks.

After the refreshing tropical mango smoothie we were considering leaving Chinatown when we stopped in one last shop to see if there was a chance that they had different merchandise. It was the same crap but this time Sarah asked the magic question. “Do you have any Kate Spade bags?”. The small Asian woman put her finger to her lips and told us to be very quiet. She then pointed to the wall and told us to follow her. We followed and in the wall was a cut-out shape of a hidden door. She opened the door and Sarah, Stephanie, and I all walked into the secret room filled to the brim with illegal knock-off bags of all kinds along with another woman who had been shopping there before we arrived and we had never noticed. So the reason why the stores had gotten smaller was because they had subdivided them into the legal storefront of bags without labels and the illicit labeled back-rooms with hidden doors.

Stephanie wasn’t looking for a bag but she found a shiny gold bag that matched her shoes and was probably a thousand dollars retail. She paid $30 bucks for it and the woman carefully wrapped it and warned her to tell nobody about what had transpired. Sarah was inspired by this but she hadn’t found her Kate Spade black diaper bag yet so we had to press on throughout Chinatown seeking out the illegal door with the secret brand name password in every shop we could find. We had to leave Stephanie and James to eat more Lychee nuts on the street while we pursued our mad lust for this bag.

We tried over twelve shops and found back rooms in so many different shapes and sizes all filled with various Whitman’s samplers of bags. I envisioned that there might be other rooms behind these rooms where the illegal activities kept getting more illegal. If you asked once in the bag room for drugs a smaller door would open. Once in the drugs room you could ask for prostitutes and climb into the basement. Finally you could ask to be transported to another dimension and a strange portal would open taking you to Zeta-7, the planet in a distant solar system where all stolen articles go.

Eventually we came upon a shop that had hanging above the counter a bag that looked just like the Kate Spade black diaper bag that we were desperate to find. So we asked the Asian woman if they had Kate Spade and walked through a display area filled with clothes and through a door behind it into a large back room with two mothers with their two daughters. The back room also contained someone in a hidden toilet who walked out of a wall so I asked whether I could go to the bathroom. The back room didn’t hold the bag we were looking for so Sarah asked her specifically for what she wanted and the woman though about it and said that we needed to wait for five minutes. We spent the five minutes discussing the features of diaper bags with the two mothers who had been through the experience since they had their daughters in the back room with them ready to be sold into white slavery. The Asian woman buzzed someone on her walkie-talkie in Chinese and after five minutes the same tagless bag we had seen came back with a Kate Spade label carefully superglued to the front. Sarah examined it with the mothers for quality and compliance with the standards of the manufacturer and then negotiated a $35 settlement with the woman. We left the store and found Stephanie and James.

I highly recommend the experience.