The Glamour Hammer
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Like the Chapmans, Givenchys, and Pauline Trigeres in the catalog, Leslie Hindman Auctioneers is a bit of history making a comeback. Hindman founded it in 1982, when she was a twentysomething from Hinsdale with four years of experience at Sotheby’s. Backed by corporate power brokers including former Sara Lee head John Bryan and MacLean-Fogg CEO Barry MacLean, she carved out a niche by doing what the big auction houses wouldn’t–taking on whole estates, selling everything from the heirloom jewels to the vacuum cleaner. (In 1986 she also became a co-owner of Salvage One, an architectural recycler.) She auctioned off the belongings of Chicago patricians like the Robert McCormick and Potter Palmer families, as well as the seats, lockers, and bricks of Comiskey Park, and snagged worldwide headlines when one of her employees spotted an unknown van Gogh on the wall of a suburban Milwaukee ranch house. Hindman sold the painting for $1.4 million and soon had her own Roadshow: a pair of television programs on the Home & Garden network and a syndicated column in the Chicago Tribune. In ’97 Sotheby’s came back and bought her out.
But Hindman says more of the public now understands that auctions are like buying wholesale, and the Internet has made every one a global event. She did a dozen her first year back, half of them modestly priced “marketplace” sales, with most items going for $100 to $500. Gross sales were $8 million. Her catalogs list high and low estimates for each item or group of items in a lot; bidding starts at about half the low estimate. Buyers pay the “hammer price” plus a premium of 20 percent to the house (less for sales over $100,000); sellers also pay the house a percentage.
WHEN: Tue 6/21, 5:30 PM
Cindy Bandle, 1955-2005
