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Guy walks into a clothing store with 20,000 white, short-sleeve, uniform tops that he doesn't know what to do
 with. The owner buys them for 25 cents each, dyes them bizarre colors and then resells them at 3-for-$10.

This isn't a joke (or is it?): It's how Ira Russack turned a used-clothing store on a then-desolate street into
 a hugely profitable business, fashion trendsetter and cultural touchstone called Canal Jean.

To hear Russack today, he was just an idiot savant who was in the right place at the right time -- the early
 1970s, when manufacturing had abandoned Soho to the artists.

"Pearl Paint was just an old-fashioned, Canal Street paint store, but they made a killing when they started
 selling a full range of art supplies," Russack said. "So I thought, 'What can I sell to these people?'" he
 said. "This was a rebellious time, but fashion was stagnant. So I just sold clothes that young people wanted."

Used denim, Army surplus, Hawaiian shirts, parachute pants, it all sold. "With 20-year-olds, wrong is right.
 They didn't care, as long as it was different."

But that Soho doesn't exist anymore, so on Jan. 19, Canal Jean will close. It isn't abandoning the
 neighborhood; the neighborhood abandoned it.

Sure, it's no great observation to note that Soho's been transformed into Madison Avenue South, what with Ann
 Taylor, Prada, Armani Exchange, Victoria's Secret, H&M and the twin Banana Republics. 

There's even a new Crate and Barrel in the Cable Building -- the Cable Building? Impossible! The Macrobiotic
 Center used to be on the second floor! -- so perhaps it's no surprise that Bloomingdale's will take over Canal
 Jean.

For some people, this is a watershed moment, no less culturally significant than the razing of Penn Station,
 the closing of the last Automat or that fateful day in the late 1980s when Gap opened on St. Marks Place.

"That Gap was the beginning of the end of the Manhattan I knew," said Stephanie Dolgoff, who, truth be told, is
 now pregnant and living in Brooklyn. "The closing of Canal Jean means that process is complete."

An editor in the Conde Nast empire, Dolgoff accompanied the style-oblivious Gnome to Canal Jean for a bit of
 fashion anthropology. She felt right at home.

"We would buy Army pants and match them with a mesh top," Dolgoff said. "And I would go home and my mother
 would say, 'I just don't know what you're trying to achieve.' But the whole point, I guess, was to look
 different."

Kids are still kids, so Canal Jean will reopen, Russack promised, "in some place where we can be a pioneer
 again."

And pave the way for Bloomingdale's.

--30--

gersh.kuntzman@verizon.net