Billy Leroy may have buried his tent on the Bowery last month, but the antiques dealer isn’t done snatching up oddities from around the world. He just got back from Glasgow, Scotland, where the seventh episode of the Travel Channel’s “Baggage Battles” was filmed. “It was a bidding bloodbath between me and my co-competitor Laurence Martin on a very historic item,” he wrote in an e-mail to The Local. “The Scottish people are really friendly and the single-malt whiskey is sublime.”

In this footage provided exclusively to The Local, Mr. Leroy, seated in front of a skull stash with his trademark cigar in hand, lets us in on the secret of getting a good deal. After the show premieres April 11 at 10 p.m., he’ll try his luck in Miami, during the filming of episode eight. “Boy, TV Land is a lot different then the Bowery,” he said. “I am starting to miss Bowery Misfits.”

As we noted on Saturday, Billy Leroy planned to fold up his tent following a late night funeral bash and place it in a casket. Tim Schreier, a community contributor for The Local, was there to snap photos of the somber scene. According to him, the casket was on loan from a friend, which raises the obvious question: what lucky stiff will be laid to rest in the box that once held Mr. Leroy’s storied tent?

The hand in formaldehyde, the dusty Styrofoam mannequins and the subway signs for sale were long gone. But last night Billy Leroy and around 200 friends celebrated the now-closed antique shop on the Bowery a final time, raising their beers inside the iconic tent that will soon be six feet under.

“It’s sad, but it’s a new beginning,” said Mr. Leroy, patting the coffin like an old friend as neighborhood characters like Clayton Patterson, director Jim Jarmusch and writer Anthony Haden-Guest mingled with the crowd. “It’s an outpouring of love. All of my friends are here. It’s really amazing. I didn’t realize how much people love this place.”

The love was not in short supply because Mr. Leroy’s eponymous shop on East Houston Street at Bowery, which he ran for 10 years, had to close on Jan. 1. In the place of the store will go a two-story development, though the story isn’t entirely tragic. The tent will be gone, but the landlord, Tony Goldman, has assured Mr. Leroy his store will have a space in the building when complete.

By 8 p.m. the tent was at capacity as old friends and the crew from Mr. Leroy’s upcoming film rocked out to the bands The Naked Heroes and The Virgins. Two hours later the funeral bash had spilled out to the sidewalk.

At one point Mr. Leroy — a raconteur if there ever was one — grabbed the mic and shared a tale from his tent’s glory days. “A homeless dude came into the store and he brought me some pieces of junk. I said, ‘Dude, I don’t want this crap. Bring me like a human head or something,’” he recalled. “The next week, he was on 12th Street and saw a beautiful trunk. He was going to bring me the trunk, but it smelled funny. Inside the trunk was a young lady, dead. He was going to bring her to me, but he freaked out, and the cops took the trunk. His name is Spider, and he’s probably slithering around here somewhere.”

Not surprisingly, that wasn’t the only example of gallows humor last night.
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Courtesy Travel Channel Billy Leroy on the set of “Baggage Battles.”

Billy Leroy, the proprietor of Billy’s Antiques & Props, said the goodbye bash that was originally planned for late January probably won’t happen until next month, and it’ll be followed by a proper burial.

“We’re going to have a monster party. It’s going to be in March, most likely on the tenth. I’m confirming the date this week,” said Mr. Leroy, who just got back from filming in Atlanta and Indianapolis for the Travel Channel show, “Baggage Battles.” Read more…

Tim Schreier

Good morning, East Village.

The above photo is from the Occupy Wall Street Farmers March from the La Plaza Cultural community garden to Zuccotti Park. You can see more of Tim Schreier’s photos here. On Sunday, about 250 participants (by EV Grieve’s estimate) marched to promote “dialogue, solidarity and solutions to corporate control of our food system,” according to a flyer.

The Times reports that Billy’s Antiques, the tent near the corner of Bowery and Houston that has been stocked with oddities and ephemera since 1986, will close so that its landlord can start construction on a two-story building. Billy Leroy, the tent’s “Barnumesque” owner, will be allowed to reopen in the new building, but a member of his staff considers the closure “part of that final transition to a landscape of Pottery Barns and Starbucks.”

EV Grieve notices candles outside of Joe’s Bar commemorating the recent death of its owner. Read more…