On most Saturdays during the warmer months of the year, Chad Senzel starts his mornings the same way. He takes the train from his Harlem apartment to a fourth-floor walk-up in Chinatown, where he dismantles a mobile hanging rack made from plumbing pipes and plywood. He divides a couple of neatly-folded piles of clothing into several Ikea bags, and schleps them down the stairs, in however many trips it takes, to the building’s narrow, dimly-lit vestibule. He reassembles the rack, hangs up the clothes, and rolls it onto the East Broadway bike lane, wheeling and weaving his inventory through New York traffic.
And then, once he’s comfortably situated on the corner of Ludlow and Canal, Senzel sets up Street Rack, a makeshift vintage boutique that’s quickly become a fixture of the neighborhood—and the best place to score a bargain on the secondhand grail of your dreams.
Instagram content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
A graffiti-plastered backdrop and a pavement floor crowded with litter isn’t the usual domain of a retail mecca. But Street Rack is unusual in a lot of ways—it doesn’t have a roof, for one, let alone a permanent brick-and-mortar location. The only playlist is New York City’s frenetic ostinato: whatever wafts from the speakers of passing cars, blaring sirens, pedestrian banter. “Street Rack is intended to be incredibly convenient and easy,” Senzel explains one sunny spring afternoon. “You don’t even have to open a door.” Customers don’t wander into his store so much as wander through it, bemusedly sizing up his wares in the process.
Senzel started Street Rack in 2019 while working as a visual merchandiser at J.Crew. At first, he set up shop outside of a friend’s apartment on Mott street. But after losing his job during the throes of the pandemic, his itinerant pop-up became more than a hobby, eventually landing on the border of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, a calculated move given his commute from Harlem.
His little slice of vintage nirvana sits at the epicenter of Manhattan’s downtown scene, a thrumming hub of young, creatively-inclined clothing obsessives with time to kill and money to burn. On Saturdays, Senzel caters to them all, hobnobbing with locals who thumb through his four-foot rack looking for obscure graphic tees, gently-worn Ralph Lauren jorts, and a smattering of high-fashion designer gems from decades past.
The one thing they won’t find? Clothing priced with an extortionary markup; at Street Rack, prices average around $40 and never go above $100. “I think there's room for something [in the vintage scene] that's intentionally underpriced,” Senzel says. “Most stores, if they're good, they're expensive. And if they're inexpensive, there's probably a lot of crap to look through.”
Since the pandemic, New York’s roster of rogue vintage dealers has exploded in number, but few have kept up the hustle long enough to make it a full-time gig, let alone afford a space to host their finds. But against the odds (and despite the occasional rainy day), Street Rack has become an improbable success—so much so, in fact, that Senzel now stores rarer pieces in an appointment-only showroom, the same walk-up that houses his trusty rack during the week. Hyper-dedicated customers regularly stop by to peruse the selection, along with cool-hunters from brands like J.Crew and Supreme.
Street Rack, though, remains Senzel’s primary focus. It might not have a roof, but braving the elements—and the throngs of passersby—feels like a fair price to pay for vintage gold.
