Bob Beaty’s American St. warehouse was part of his mission to ‘save the earth.’ It’s closing this month.

A baptismal font sat just past the partitions in Bob Beaty’s corner of 1800 American St. A portrait of former New York governor Thomas Dewey covered a table at the center of the room, flanked by a multicolored map of Philadelphia and a 1944 Inquirer report on Patton’s Third Army as it pressed through France. And the iconic sign from the old Bookbinder’s restaurant kept watch over a maze of art and artifacts pulled from other local landmarks.

The collection, housed in a corner of an enormous North Philadelphia warehouse, represented the culmination of Beaty’s lifelong obsession: Saving the world.

By hauling furniture and decorations from pending demolitions, closures and renovations, then selling them for fractions of their initial worth, Beaty doesn’t just see himself as flipping antiques. Instead, Beaty American Salvage is a fortress in his 51-year crusade against a culture that, in his view, consumes cheaply and discards thoughtlessly.

“This is nothing new,” Beaty said of his drive to find second lives for everything from light fixtures to staircases. “They’ve been doing it for centuries — the Greeks, the Romans.”

But Beaty plans to close his wing of the warehouse at month’s end and sell much of the remaining stock to Alabama-based Southern Accents Salvage. After that, he’ll focus on what he sees as a more manageable project: Recycling discarded raw materials into furniture through another local project of his, Philada.

Beaty, 77, first got into salvage at 18 when he encountered crews demolishing Sellenberg’s Department Store on 12th and Market streets. It seemed a shame to let the shop’s ornate decorations land in some dump, he told a newscast in 2014. So, he hauled away the store’s marble tiling and sold them to a contractor.

After two years serving in Vietnam and a bachelor’s degree from St. Joseph’s University, Beaty found himself enmeshed in the 1970s-era “reduce, reuse, recycle” movement. That eventually led him to the Ohmega Salvage commune in Berkeley, California. Ohmega’s founders, Victor “Vito” Lab and Bob Ford, had a “hippie sensibility” that drove them to resell items from demolished local sites use them to support Northern California’s artists.

“I wanted to do what I can to save the planet,” Beaty said. “Even if it’s a small piece, that’d be my piece.”

Beaty spent more than a decade working with Ohmega and launching architectural salvage projects of his own in the San Francisco Bay Area before embarking on similar projects in and around Philadelphia.

For years, Beaty partnered with Northeast Philadelphia waste management business owner Richard P. Burns to salvage sites around town. He founded Provenance Salvage in Kensington in 2009, then Beaty American in 2014. He visited grade schools in New Jersey and paid prisoners to scour California for pre-used wares.He persuaded the Barnes Foundation to use recycled wood for its flooring when it moved to the Parkway in 2011. He managed to salvage the police station door from “Mare of Easttown,” the 2021 drama series featuring Kate Winslet in an immaculate Delco accent. And he repurposed wooden chunks from the roof of the Academy of Music, inviting local artists and artisans to do the same.

“I say he’s the original recycler,” said local artist Roger Wing, who carved many of Beaty American’s buddhas. “I think he was ahead of the curve. And I think a lot of us have picked up from him a lot of the ethos that we carry forward.”

During construction on the Independence Visitor Center in the late 1990s, Beaty and Burns tried to sell parts of the Judge Lewis Fountain that Edmund P. Bacon placed on the adjacent mall. Few customers wanted to purchase them as, well, fountains. But one prominent homeowner in Maine expressed interest. So, Burns and Beaty routed Bacon’s bronze to their new customer’s backyard.

“An antique dealer ordered them,” Beaty said of the fountain’s sculptures. “And then they, in turn, went to Martha Stewart.”

Eventually, Ohmega became a cautionary tale for the mismatch between mission and culture: Ownership of the Bay Area collective passed from a series of owners to Bob Stravinsky and finally his widow, Katherine Davis, in 2021. And sagging interest, fueled by the pandemic and a growth of cheap consumption options, drove Davis out of business in 2023.

Ohmega’s last manager, Steve Smith, pointed to Ikea as a culprit of the shift. College students used to scour salvage spaces like Beaty’s to furnish their dorms at low cost, Smith said. But the magic of mass-produced home decor and cheap overseas labor lured them into the world of unconscientious consumption.

Beaty also sees that instinct in Philadelphia, where developers often knock down centuries-old buildings in favor of spec, manufactured housing. Young renters often spurn older offerings for what Beaty sees as newer, cheaper homes.

“Maybe they lived in the suburbs and they grew up in a McMansion,” Beaty’s wife, Ann Toland Beaty, said. “And they want to get their city-fied version of that.”

The market for salvage and architectural antiques has lost interest and ground from some sectors, Bob Beaty conceded. A coffee table fashioned out of woods beams from the Academy of Music’s roof remains untouched, and a staircase pulled from a local mansion drew more bewilderment than genuine interest. It’s a part of what Beaty decried as “the disposable society.”

“We dispose of things very easily,” he said, “and then we dispose of each other.”

But architectural salvage was never merely about keeping cultural treasures out of the landfill, he said. It seeks instead to find worth in items that otherwise risked being dismissed — and, therefore, wasted.

“It was never about the money to me,” he said. “It was always the mission.”