The Point of It All
By [Your Name]
On a narrow stretch of Bleecker Street, where a yoga studio dissolves into a vegan café and the vegan café into a store selling ceramic incense holders shaped like forest spirits, there sits a modest, wood-framed shop called The Point of It All. The name, like most things in Manhattan, is both literal and ironic.
Behind the counter stands Hiram Blass, a man who has made a life, and arguably a minor art form, out of antique thumbtacks. The doorbell jingles as he greets each visitor with the mild surprise of someone encountering the species anew. “People assume they’re all the same,” he says, gesturing toward a glass case arranged like a jeweler’s. Inside, on velvet pads, glint the objects of his obsession: brass-plated stars from the 1890s, mother-of-pearl-capped tacks from a defunct Parisian stationery, and a set of Bakelite pins once used in the drafting room of the Woolworth Building. “Every tack,” Blass says, “was once a decision.”
Blass, sixty-one, lives above the store in an apartment where thumbtacks frame the art and the art depicts thumbtacks. His days begin early, often with a cup of chicory coffee and a brief meditation on pressure. “They were made to hold,” he says, “but not forever.” He’s fond of that paradox—the tension between permanence and impermanence, between keeping and letting go—that defines his trade and, perhaps, his temperament.
His clientele is a mix of interior designers, museum archivists, and the simply curious. A young couple once came in seeking something “historic but functional” to hang a Polaroid. Blass sold them a 1903 steel tack manufactured in Buffalo. “It’s still holding,” they wrote him three years later, “but the photo’s faded.” He keeps the note under glass near the register.
When asked how he found his way to such a precise corner of the antique world, Blass shrugs. “I started as a picture framer,” he says. “Then I began noticing what held the pictures up.” What began as an aesthetic footnote became, over decades, an archive of industrial design in miniature—a museum of the overlooked.
In recent years, collectors from Japan and Denmark have sought him out; the Met’s decorative-arts department borrowed several pieces for an exhibit on the evolution of domestic objects. “They returned everything,” Blass says, “except one brass tack from 1911.” He smiles. “I like to think it’s holding up a wall label somewhere.”
On weekends, the shop gets a trickle of the devoted: a retired engineer who comes to polish the German nickel-plated set he donated; a poet who insists the sound of a tack pressed into cork is “the perfect iamb.” Blass listens, polishing the glass counter, half amusement, half reverence.
“I suppose most people come here looking for the past,” he says. “But me, I’m looking for the moment just before something is attached.”
Outside, Bleecker hums with the restlessness of the city—new shops, new names, everything moving fast. Inside The Point of It All, the air feels paused, caught between touch and release. On the wall behind Hiram Blass, a small brass tack pins up a yellowed sign that reads, simply, OPEN.
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