New York’s Vintage Street Rack King Finally Has a Store of His Own

In the months following the worst of the pandemic, New York City’s brick-and-mortar retail scene rested on shaky ground. In Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood, though, it was boom times for Chad Senzel, the proprietor of Street Rack, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it rack of vintage clothing situated on the sidewalk between Ludlow and Canal. Street Rack first went wheels up in 2019, but it really took off during COVID, when Senzel’s idea to set up shop en plein air suddenly seemed like a novel, pandemic-compliant way to indulge in a little retail therapy.

Senzel wasn’t the first rogue garmento to stake his claim on a slice of pavement downtown, and he certainly wasn’t the last. But he might be the only one to establish his makeshift operation as a genuine destination for menswear obsessives, especially those with a hankering for weathered ’90s-era Ralph Lauren khakis or faded Stüssy tees from the early aughts.

Eventually, Senzel’s remit expanded to include a small showroom a few blocks away from his hanging rack, where stylists, designers, and devoted clients could peruse his rarer inventory under one non-proverbial roof. When that lease expired last year, he continued to post up on Ludlow and Canal every Saturday. By then, his rack was just one of many jostling for attention on the Chinatown sidewalks.

Despite Senzel’s expert selection, Street Rack was always exactly that. The rack “was so disarming and so easy for people to literally walk by,” he says, but as its popularity grew in tandem with his roster of repeat customers, Senzel’s ability to focus on random passersby gradually diminished. Where a rack scans as ephemeral by nature, “a store kind of enables discovery in a way that the rack never could.” So after several years of running his business without a fitting room, let alone a roof, Senzel signed a lease on Eldridge Street and set a launch date for late July.

Chad Senzel, the store, confronts a local vintage market nearing the point of over-saturation. Its namesake attributes his initial success to sharp curation and stellar customer service, and his store promises both in spades—along with an assortment that augments more approachable Street Rack fare with finds he once reserved for the showroom.

“As competition in this industry becomes more fierce, the need for taste and perspective is more heightened than ever,” Senzel says. “Some [vintage stores] go the route of trying to have the best stuff, the most drool-worthy, red-carpet-ready, Instagrammable stuff.” Senzel is more focused on identifying what folks in his neck of the woods—current and future customers alike—actually wear on a day-to-day basis.