Daniel Neal, a former bookseller in the Underground Used Books at Copperfield’s across the street, admits to having left things in the holes from time to time during his time at the store.
“I don’t recall anything specific, really,” he says. “Toys, oddball stuff I found in the Underground, wheat pennies. I loved walking by and seeing what people were leaving in the wall.”
Neal is not alone.
“It’s a perfect place to bring a little strangeness into people’s lives,” adds Ross Lockhart, another former Copperfield’s employee who confesses to being one of many who’ve found the niches to be an irresistible opportunity to express themselves by placing something off-the – wall into the wall.
One has to ask: is there anyone who currently works at the bookstore who is actively participating in this bizarrely altruistic ritual?
Of course there is.
“I’ve been working at the book store for three-and-a-half years, and I got on board with doing this pretty quickly, because it’s super fun,” confesses Ellen Skagerberg, another underground bookseller. Met at the store at the end of the week in early June, Skagerberg says she regularly takes pictures of the things she sees in the niches, and is especially impressed when someone turns the empty space in the bricks into a miniature diorama, posing little figures in some kind of picturesque tableau. As her shift has just ended, Skagerberg offers to demonstrate the clandestine gift delivery system she’s perfected.
“Let’s see, what do I want to leave today?”
Producing a plastic Ziploc bag filled with “goodies” that she’s collected just for this purpose, Skagerberg leads the way out of the store and over to the niches, explaining that she generally finds such items at local flea markets and thrift stores.
“Goodwill will sell you a bag full of stuff like this for four bucks,” she says, displaying the bag crammed with brightly colored thingamabobs, pens and pencils, Happy Meal meal toys, rubber insects and the like. “I’ve only been caught two times. You have to be very sly.”
Opening her bag, Skagerberg sorts through the bounty within, quickly producing a plastic vintage kid’s meal toy from Wendy’s — a 1992 Rocket Writer pen in the shape of a hybrid limousine/spacecraft.
“The pen doesn’t work anymore, but how cool is this?” Skagerberg says, holding up the offering and then happily tucking it into one of the holes in the wall. “My choices are pretty random, just whatever I have and whatever I feel like leaving on a particular day.”
Working quickly, she moves on to the other two niches, placing a rubber snake, a plastic Norse warrior figurine and a little green army man. Skagerberg full anticipates needing to replace these items the next time she passes by as they will almost certainly be gone.
“I always thought that things were more successful if they stay in the niche longer,” she says, “but I’ve become comfortable with fact that everything comes and goes.”
Though Skagerberg appears to be one of the earliest adopters of leaving treasures in the holes, she is eager to point out that she is hardly the first to do it. When she realized that some of the post-its with cartoons on them bore a resemblance to the drawings of Eduardo Beltran, owner/operator of Hair by Eduardo on Putnam Plaza, a short walk from the niches.
“It was me! I started it,” says Beltran, who estimates that he’s been leaving treasures in the niches for about five years. “I like to make Petaluma happy,” he says, allowing that when the pandemic shutdowns happened, even though there were fewer people downtown, he felt it was as important as ever to keep up the practice.
“We still did it during COVID, oh yes,” he says, acknowledging the involvement of Skagerberg and the other Copperfield’s participants. “We like to put happy stuff in there, like these.”
Beltran, in his art-filled studio above Petaluma Pie Company, shows off some of his cartoon-like drawings. “I like to put happy things there, and sometimes I draw a little picture on a piece of paper and leave it in the hole. So much graffiti stuff is negative. But we make people happy, by leaving little surprises. When people get off of work, and they are walking by, this gives them something to look at, something that is funny or loving.”
Asked how he feels about the items disappearing so quickly, Beltran says that’s the whole point.
“We want you to take our stuff. It’s a gift,” he says. “And then you carry a little bit of us with you, even if they don’t know who gave you that gift. It’s nice. It’s about spreading happiness and love. That’s what the world needs, and this is a beautiful way to do that.”