Rock history for sale, one piece of St. Andrews Hall's floor at a time

The floor at Saint Andrews Hall in Detroit has seen its share of wear and tear over the years from concertgoers who have spilled sweat, booze and anything else you can imagine across its wood panels.

And pieces of that floor, caked in grimy history, are flying out the door from Eastpointe's Tom Mozer.

Mozer has been selling sections of Saint Andrews Hall's floor online for the past year to fans who want to own a small piece of the historic rock club, where thousands of artists — from Smashing Pumpkins to Snoop Dogg, from Dead Milkmen to Deftones, from Adele to Eminem — have performed over the decades.

"I knew there were lots of people like me and my friends who just absolutely love the Hall," says Mozer. "A lot of people hold that place dear."

Mozer is a former security guard at Saint Andrews Hall, who worked the door and the stage at the rock club in the early 2000s, after growing up going to shows there.

When the floor was being redone during the 100-year-old building's renovation in 2015, Mozer got a heads up from a friend he knew from working there that pieces of the floor were up for grabs, if he could grab them. (This was well before the incident last March where the Hall's floor buckled while Las Vegas rapper Baby Keem performed on stage, which caused the venue to be shuttered for several months while the floor was repaired.)

Mozer pulled up in his Ford Focus and filled it with as many pieces of the flooring as he could. He carted them home with him and kept them stashed for years, at first in his garage and later in his basement, with no clue what he was going to do with all those pieces of weathered, worn-down rock and roll wood.

He had ideas, impractical as they turned out to be, to put down panels to recreate a small section of the Saint Andrews floor in his basement. But the pieces were too broken up and mismatched for anything of the sort.

He had considered selling it to a place like Woodward Throwbacks, the Hamtramck furniture and home goods store that builds new items out of reclaimed wood from Detroit spaces. But then two summers ago, Mozer cut off a small panel to give to a friend, and he liked how it turned out. That's when it hit him: he could section the floor into small pieces and sell them online, and he opened up an Etsy store to handle the business transactions.

Sales were slow at first, and he was moving only a few a month. "Do people actually want to have dirty old wood that people have stepped on and spit on and spilled drinks on and who knows what else?" Mozer, 45, says he wondered.

Then in November, sales started taking off. Now they're moving as quickly as he can cut them and put them up for sale; Mozer, whose day job is working for a defense contractor, will completely sell out later this month, he says.

He sells the pieces in three frameable sizes: 5x7, 8x10 and 11x14. Prices range from $20 to $80.

Jack Brown, who worked at Saint Andrews for about 10 years, recently purchased one of the larger panels from Mozer's Etsy store. "When I opened it, it was honestly a little more emotional than I expected," says the 45-year-old Wayne resident, who was flooded with memories upon seeing the old flooring.

He's not the only one who has felt that way, Mozer says.

"The biggest surprise for me is hearing people’s reactions," he says. "They saw their panel and they got teary eyed. They spent the most important years of their lives (at Saint Andrews), they made the most friends there, and now they have a piece of the place forever. I didn’t know people would be so affected by it, and that’s been the most rewarding thing out of all of this."

agraham@detroitnews.com

@grahamorama