You didn’t come to New York to wander fluorescent aisles hunting for someone to unlock the fitting room. You came for the locked-door city — where nothing’s labeled, the elevator grumbles and whoever buzzes you in has already decided how the afternoon should go.
You might leave with a sterling silver carabiner, a fossilized dinosaur foot or a record that makes everything else on your shelf sound flat. Or maybe it was just a book you didn’t know you were missing until it looked back at you.
But don’t bother dropping by. These places don’t do foot traffic. You email. You call a landline. You wait. Maybe you DM. There’s no signage, no small talk, no piped-in jazz. What there is: hand-forged armor, prehistoric bones with six-figure price tags, music that’s never been digitized, a jewelry showroom with the logic of a toolbox, and — if you’re buzzed in — a private library (with all the books for sale) that reads like someone’s inner filing system.
This isn’t retail. It’s an invitation-only obsession. And if you knock with purpose, that helps.
889 Broadway, Union Square, Manhattan
Globus Washitsu
Up a nondescript elevator near Union Square, through a quiet hallway and a final sliding door, is something few New Yorkers expect to find above Broadway: a Kyoto-style tatami room meticulously built by the investor and longtime Japanophile Stephen Globus. Think shoji screens, hinoki beams, seasonal scrolls — nothing here is an approximation. It’s the real deal.
Globus Washitsu isn’t a commercial teahouse. It’s a cultural space with two adjoining tatami rooms, carefully designed for a range of intimate, immersive experiences. One of the rooms, KeiSui-An, is a traditional teahouse used for lessons in Japanese tea ceremony ($50 per person for members, $60 for nonmembers) — but the entire space shifts as needed to host calligraphy workshops, rakugo storytelling nights, kimono exhibitions and other quiet arts of Japan: music, dance, ikebana. It also occasionally serves as a ryokan-style guesthouse for visiting artists and scholars.
You email for an appointment, remove your shoes at the door and enter a hushed, warm space where calm isn’t a marketing promise; it’s a policy. Whether you’re there for tea or to simply sit and listen, you leave feeling quieter. And in this city, that’s no small thing.
37 West 47th Street, 9th Floor, Diamond District, Manhattan
Marla Aaron
Most people come to the Diamond District for a ring. But here you’ll find a sterling silver carabiner with a click so satisfying it should be studied.
Marla Aaron isn’t your typical jeweler; she’s a high-end designer with a locksmith’s brain, a sculptor’s eye and a deep love of things that open and shut. Perched on the ninth floor of 37 West 47th Street, her appointment-only showroom feels more like a jeweler’s lab crossed with a toy chest. Drawers of chains. Trays of tools. Jewelry cases that double as sewing boxes.
Her signature locks — platinum and brass, ranging from $110 to over $250,000 for one especially extravagant version, made from pink diamonds — are meant to be held, twisted and remixed. They have been sold from vending machines, smuggled into museum shows and handed out by the thousands to single mothers on Mother’s Day.
In 2024, Ms. Aaron won the GEM Award for Jewelry Design. She recently opened a mini-store inside Liberty — the iconic department store in London — but the original New York showroom is still where the story clicks into place.
Appointments are booked online, and virtual appointments are available for out-of-towners — her team walks clients through the collection over Zoom with the same care for detail and touch. “The showroom is my pride,” she told me. Book ahead — and prepare to leave with something you won’t want to stop clicking open and closed.
Ridgewood, Queens
WassonArtistry
In Ridgewood, inside a factory building with no signage, Jeffrey Wasson is doing something very few people alive can do: forging medieval armor by hand, exactly the way it was done 600 years ago.
Mr. Wasson studied at the School of Visual Arts, fell in with the Society for Creative Anachronism and got hooked on hammering metal. More than two decades in, he builds custom suits for jousters, re-enactors, museums and films — including Men in Black 3. His work is also permanently displayed at Discovery Park of America in Tennessee.
This isn’t a shop — it’s a working forge, and appointments are required. It smells like scorched steel and something more elemental: a lived-in focus that doesn’t pause for small talk. Clients are measured in person and return for fittings as pieces are roughed, shaped and refined. Mr. Wasson’s Italian-style helms and battle-ready gauntlets are researched down to the rivet spacing. One finished suit rests in the corner, heavy and ready.
You can commission a full suit of armor ($15,000 to $50,000), take a private dagger-forging class ($650), or join an occasional New York Adventure Club visit ($32). No themed music, no cosplay — just iron, fire and a guy who’s spent 20 years turning a childhood obsession into serious plate armor.
247 Water Street #401, Dumbo, Brooklyn
Archivio Records
Archivio is more vinyl bunker than retail space. It’s a Dumbo concept store: part record shop, D.J. hub, barbershop, tattoo parlor and creative hangout. Co-founded by the D.J. and Queens native Pablo Romero (who asked for a shout out to his Colombian background) and the designer Daniel Corral-Webb, this upstairs Dumbo loft draws an international mix: visiting D.J.s, stylists, design-world regulars and the curious who’ve heard whispers.
There’s an obsessively curated selection of electronic vinyl, from 1980s house to obscure techno subgenres (from $5 to $200). A sound engineer, Mr. Romero is known for matching people to records with eerie precision. In the back, there’s an appointment-only barbershop and tattoo setup, where Camo Contreras tattoos in one chair and Christian Restrepo cuts hair in the next.
During my visit, a young and excruciatingly hip London D.J. was crate-digging up front while someone in the back debated tattoo placement between fades. It’s by appointment, not attitude. Archivio doesn’t advertise; it doesn’t need to. People who need it tend to find it, including a few celebrities who either show up on their Instagram — or make sure they don’t.
882 Lorimer Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn
High Valley Books
There’s no sign. Just a buzzer and a plain Greenpoint doorway that leads, improbably, to one of New York’s most extraordinary private bookstores.
High Valley Books is run out of Bill Hall’s living room and basement, and it’s where fashion archivists, interior designers and set decorators go when they need the perfect print reference from 1963 or a magazine no one remembers.
Founded in 1999, the store has no website, searchable inventory or price tags. Appointments are made via landline — (347) 889-6346 — or Instagram DM. First-timers get a quiet tour. Regulars know to leave time for the basement, where the discoveries get stranger and better.
It’s part archive dig, part conversation. Hall might pull something you didn’t know to ask for. Or he might introduce you to someone across the room hunting something adjacent. Some books cost $40. Some cost as much as a Vespa. Bill knows which is which, and he’ll explain why — if you ask.
417 Fifth Avenue, Midtown, Manhattan
Astro Gallery of Gems
Astro Gallery of Gems bills itself as the world’s largest gem and mineral shop. Upstairs, you can browse the vault-size geodes and sapphires. But the basement — by appointment only — is where things take a turn for the Jurassic. This is where the president and chief executive Dennis Tanjeloff stores his back room full of prehistoric flex: a $125,000 Odontopteryx tilapia skeleton (since sold), trilobites big as house cats, meteorite slices and the kind of dino bones that end up in Gulf State palaces or private Colorado libraries.
It’s a celebrity obsession, too — he calls his buyers “grown-up boys” who never got over the idea that dinosaurs were real. Among the best-known fossil collectors: Brad Pitt, Nicolas Cage and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Mr. Tanjeloff is part dealer, part historian and wholly unbothered by those who disapprove of his trade. (Not everyone loves the idea of rare fossils going to private collectors instead of museums.) His current selection, which ranges from $24 for small ammonites to $95,000 for a Tyrannosaurus rex tibia, comes from old collections, private digs and other dealers. “You’re not hurting a thing,” he shrugs. “They’re already extinct.”
Book ahead, ask for the fossil room and expect numbers that make you blink. If you don’t leave with an ancient jawbone, you’ll at least understand why some people feel compelled to try.
Laurie Gwen Shapiro lives in New York City. Her next book, “The Aviator and the Showman,” about Amelia Earhart and her husband George Palmer Putnam, will be published in July by Viking.
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Hiroko Masuike is a New York-based photographer and photo editor for The Times.
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