Shipping Precious Loot Locally

Shopping for antiques can be as easy as opening your wallet. But after you score a great deal on that mahogany drop-leaf table in Brooklyn, how do you get it home to the Upper East Side?

Enter the antiques handlers. They are the movers — if not shakers — of New York's antiques market. But the people who pack, ship, and truck all manner of old and breathtakingly expensive things through the city's nexus of galleries, auction houses, private homes, and museums need more than muscle. Lugging is only half the job description. The other half is possessing the composure and care of a conservator.

"Good handling really makes the difference," the director of Berwald Oriental Art, Cynthia Volk, said.

Berwald, an antiques gallery on East 57th Street that specializes in Han (206 B.C.E.-9 C.E.) and Tang (618-906 C.E.) dynasty ceramics and pottery, ships things that are extremely fragile and many thousands of years old. "There's nothing worse than when a client buys something, say, a Tang horse, and opens the box to find something has snapped off. We're talking ears, a tail, and long, slender legs," Ms. Volk said.

There are a number of high-end antiques and fine-art handlers in New York. Surround Art (63 Flushing Ave., Brooklyn, 718-852-4898) is one of the biggest art and antiques handlers in New York. Housed in a 75,000-square-foot warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Surround Art also packs and transports museum exhibitions. Most recently, it has been taking "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of Pharaohs" on its two-year, four-city American tour.

"You can't be intimidated by the object," an adviser to Surround Art, Rick Yamada, said. Mr. Yamada helped pack the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1993 — the first time the scrolls left Israel.

Cadogan Tate (41-20 39th St., Queens, 718-706-7999) is another reputable antiques-trade workhorse. The company, which has branches in London, Paris, and the Côte d'Azur, is housed in a three-floor warehouse in Sunnyside, Queens. Cadogan Tate has eight trucks, each of which makes a half-dozen trips into Manhattan each day.

One of its major clients is Christie's. On a recent day, the main warehouse was packed with antiques in various states of dress. Many were in crates, ready to be shipped. Others, such as a Philip Johnson-designed chess-piece sculpture, were wrapped up for storage. Even the most diminutive antiques are heavy when packed.

"In our line, pianos are really a walk in the park," the vice president of the New York branch of Cadogan Tate, François Gauci, said. "We once walked a sofa bed up 20 flights of stairs. In fact, it was a pair of sofa beds."

Recently the company was hired to remove a 13-by-10-foot painting from the Edna Barnes Soloman Room at the New York Public Library for restoration. The painting, which, when packed, weighed more than 450 pounds, was too big to fit in the library's service elevator. (Service elevators are an industry-wide source of irritation. So are Greenwich Village walk-ups.)

An exterior lift, or hoisting the crated painting through the window, was out of the question. The solution? A five-person crew wrapped the crate in blankets and, sliding it like one of the stone building blocks of the pyramids, eased it down two flights of stairs, and out the door. The job took four hours to complete.

But that's nothing compared to packing a chandelier, which can take between two and three hours. "If we're breaking down and packing a crystal chandelier we have to number every piece, photograph it, and draw a schematic," Mr. Gauci said. "Obviously, we have to consider the guy putting it back together."