Hugh Passow has been drawn to weird old stuff since he was a boy, digging around the town dump in Arcadia with his grandfather. 

“My start of an interest in antiques was poking through my grandpa’s barns and sheds,” he said. A frugal farm family, they reused what they could find, such as pipes and building materials. 

Over time, the farm boy’s coveting of bits and bobs evolved into a love for what are known in polite company as antiques.

”

I always liked odd and unusual stuff.

Hugh PaSSow

owner of The Antique Emporium

“I always liked odd and unusual stuff,” Passow said. “I was never a Depression glass or oak furniture guy.”

While you’ll find plenty of classy Victoriana inside the Antique Emporium – the massive five-level store Passow and his wife Marcella own in downtown Eau Claire – there’s also much that’s just downright unusual: two-headed calves, a carved wooden dragon from Thailand, ceremonial masks from New Guinea, and the parts of an elephant shot by famed pin-up artist George Petty. 

“Not very many people can say they have an elephant tail,” Passow said. 

With its numerous displays of taxidermy and other items from around the world, the Antique Emporium is part retail store, part museum.

Add to that a marble bust of Susan B. Anthony, 4,000-year-old Canaanite pottery, and a lifetime’s worth of Life magazines, and the Antique Emporium is as much a museum as a retail establishment. 

In part, the emporium is an homage to the small, idiosyncratic museums that used to be found across small-town America. For example, many of the taxidermy animals in the Antique Emporium came from a long-ago auction at the Prairie Moon Museum in Cochrane, where Passow’s purchases included a full-mount alligator and a “hog oiler” – a strange cylindrical device that you’ll still find next to the register on the store’s first floor. A collection of stuffed African animals came from the collection of a Purdue University professor, while New Guinean masks were purchased from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. 

Passow has been working in, or operating businesses, downtown for most of the past 50 years, starting as a teenage stock boy at J.C. Penney in 1970. Later, he was a partner in several retail stores downtown and on Water Street, eventually opening an antique shop on Galloway Street in the early 1980s. The Antique Emporium moved into its current home – built as a Masonic Lodge in 1899 – in 1985, and within a few months the JCPenney across the street closed. That marked the beginning of the end of downtown as the city’s main retail hub, Passow said. 

The Antique Emporium, at the corner of Main and South Barstow streets, was built in 1899 as a Masonic Lodge.

Like the downtown itself, the antique business has fluctuated over the years, and gone are the days when Passow would jump at the chance to tow a 20-foot trailer to the East Coast to fill with auctioned antiques and oddities. In his early days in business, Passow embarked on such trips frequently, and loading up on treasures from estate sales and auctions. In the years after the nation’s 1976 bicentennial celebrations, he said, interest in antiques rose, and more of them came on the market because of generational change.

These days, much of the antique action is online, and even after his physical store is gone Passow plans to continue to keep up his business via online portals such as eBay and AbeBooks.

Passow has a special love for printed material, and much of the store is filled with books and prints. On the first floor – which a century ago housed a furniture store below the Masons’ chambers – there are thousands of prints: from works of art to movie posters to illustrations from old magazines.

Then there’s the sculpture – bronze, marble, and more – including the marble bust of women's rights champion Susan B. Anthony by Leonard Volk, who is most famous for his life mask of Abraham Lincoln.

Elsewhere on the first floor, you’ll find African animals, ornate furniture, and a flag carried by a German-American regiment from Eau Claire in the Civil War. The upper floor of the building – and the mezzanine that encircles it – is full of books, photographs, furniture, dishes, glassware, and countless other items, all of them carrying a story or two and in need of a new home. 

“I always liked odd and unusual stuff,” said owner Hugh Passow, shown here on the ground floor of the Antique Emporium.

The effect on the visitor can be overwhelming, but Passow’s eye for antiques means he can take it all in and process it almost instantaneously. Such visual instincts have served him well while separating antique wheat from chaff over the years.

“When I’m in (an antique) mall," he said, "I walk in and have to be able to see everything, and within 30 seconds pick it out from the mumbo jumbo." 

While Passow’s shop has been a downtown mainstay for nearly four decades, all good things must come to an end, and late last year he decided to sell the building to someone he believed had the commitment – and the money – to maintain and renovate the historic structure: Pablo Properties, which also owns the nearby Lismore Hotel, as well as numerous commercial and residential properties. The company’s plans for the building are largely TBD, although Pablo says its coworking space, CoLab, will relocate there once renovations are complete (although that’s expected to take two years).

Among the Emporium's many usual items: This turn-of-the-20th century Eau Claire pillow. Such painted fabric items didn't survive the years well and are hard to come by, Passow said.

The sale to Pablo Group closed late last year, and Passow’s business must be out by July 1 – though he can extend the lease if if he wishes. 

“We’re starting to have sleepless nights about it,” Passow acknowledged, when asked about the challenge of getting rid of the inventory that fills the giant building. 

Much of the store’s merchandise is now for sale at a discount, and they have shipped some items off to an auction house in Stanley. He plans to have some on-site auctions as well. Ultimately, Passow would like to find a smaller storefront, mainly to store antiques – as he plans to continue online sales – but he hasn’t found the perfect spot yet. 

Even if you don’t intend to buy anything – although you inevitably will – it’s worthwhile to visit this massive cabinet of curiosities to experience it before it becomes history itself. 

The Antique Emporium is open 10am-5pm Thursday-Saturday at 306 Main St., Eau Claire.

Take a peek into the Antique Emporium, thanks to these photographs by V1's Photographer Andrea Paulseth ...

Among the taxidermy oddities: plenty of fish and a two-headed calf.

A marble bust of women's rights leader Susan B. Anthony by noted sculptor Leonard Volk.

A view from the top-floor balcony showing the countless treasures below.

The Antique Emporium features one of the oldest elevators in Eau Claire. It was added to the building in 1927, after the Masons relocated to their new building on Graham Avenue.

Almost everything here is antique, including the cash register.

With thousands of volumes, the Antique Emporium is the only significant used bookstore in Eau Claire.