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Many people have to drive far or take the bus to get their nails done.
Toni Fanning doesn’t have to.
The owner of Ritual Arts simply needs to walk out of her store and go up one flight of stairs for her appointment with nail artist Jenny Johnson. These appointments between Fanning and Johnson, who owns Wild Tiger Studios, have become a ritual for the two friends.
Clowns and tigers from another era watch us from their perch on an orange Formica table. Aside from the Labubu dolls, the art that lines the turquoise and orange walls of Wild Tiger Studios would not be out of place in a sixties comedy horror. Today, Fanning is asking Johnson to paint her nails to resemble pufferfish.
For an Aquarius, this seems fitting. Fanning started following the movement of the stars and magicking twigs and rocks in her childhood home in Northeast Philadelphia. She went to a Catholic girls’ school there, where she was assigned to do a project on whatever religion she wanted. She chose Sufism, a dimension of Islam.
“That was when I started to find out that almost every single major religion has some sort of magical or spiritual or mystical-spiritual aspect to it, and that was what I ended up doing my project on,” said Fanning. “And I’ll tell you, I couldn’t get enough of the research. I wanted to go to college for it, and knew I couldn’t.”
Not much has changed about her in this aspect: for over forty years, Fanning has been bringing items of mystique and magick to Harvard Avenue, from meteor remnants that came to Earth 4.5 billion years ago to hiddenite gemstones from Pakistan that “encourage spiritual growth from the heart outwards.”
Fanning came to Oak Square from Albuquerque with a boyfriend in 1976. She began working in quality control and R&D at a pharmaceutical company, before leaving because its owner refused to give her a raise. She told Fanning, “I can’t give you that kind of money, because sooner or later you’re going to want to get married and have a baby.” Fanning responded, “Well, I’m not getting married, and I’m not gonna have a baby and I’m giving you my notice right now.”
She started working at Duplicopy in the early ‘80s, a shop where bands would have their posters printed and locals would have their materials copied and business cards made.
A music lover, Fanning recalled how the ‘Til Tuesday’s lead singer Aimee Mann (“like, the best Jackie O. I’ve ever seen”) tried to get her attention, asking, “Don’t you know who I am?” and encountering the members of rock band Phish (“the cutest little boys when they walked in that store”). Duplicopy was located at 160 Harvard Avenue, across the street from where Ritual Arts is located today.
Saturn in retrograde: The marriage of a print shop and a “little freaky shop”
“It was my Saturn return, and I just said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna blow up my entire life.’ I quit my job at a pharmaceutical firm. I broke up with my boyfriend. I bought this little store,” Fanning told us, as Johnson buffed her nails.
The former owner of Duplicopy sold the store to her, and she opened Ritual Arts inside the same space, selling “semi-witchy stuff” alongside the print business. Eventually she split the two stores, keeping Duplicopy where it was on Harvard Avenue and moving Ritual Arts to the Allston Mall, which was a set of “little freaky shops like me,” located on the second floor of 107 Brighton Avenue. Ritual Arts was located directly above Linden Superette, abutting underground bookstores and video stores, art galleries, and a punk clothing store called Allston Beat.
In 1993, she moved to 153 Harvard Avenue, where Ritual Arts has called home for over thirty years. She also ran Duplicopy in the space for about two years before closing down its operations, but, before that happened, Fanning’s Duplicopy and Ritual Arts had been entered in a nationwide contest for weirdest combination of businesses under one roof and won.
Forming friendships at the Gordon Building
The first time we saw Fanning, she was walking out of Ritual Arts and toward the building’s entrance to the second floor for her nail appointment. We were speaking with Danny Kingphilavanh, an owner of Regeneration Tattoo, which is directly adjacent to Ritual Arts. He’s planning to permanently close his store next week. Passing each other in the sun, the two warmly greeted each other as old friends.
“How you doin’?” Fanning says to Kingphilavanh.
“I’m alright-y. What’s happening?”
“The same thing that’s happening to you!” The pair laughs.
“We’ll talk soon.”
These interactions come second nature to Fanning, whose friendships in the Gordon Building date back over three decades. A part of her initial interactions with the folks who occupied the Gordon Building came from running Duplicopy, where she would receive printing jobs from friends who worked upstairs, including the lawyers at Katz & Associates, the typesetter Florella Orowan, and the building’s landlord Joseph “Joe” Gordon and his son Gerald “Gerry” Gordon, who would later become the landlord of the building until late June of this year.
Fanning and many of her fellow tenants have become close friends with each other and their landlords the Gordons, attending Gerry Gordan’s late wife’s funeral and planning an appreciation party for him in October 2024. “There were people who weren’t there, couldn’t make it, who also pitched in even though they couldn’t be there.”
Even Barry Hynes, the owner of Glenville Auto Body, who is not a tenant, came to the party. “He rents space in the parking lot. He had one of those Bobcat snowplows. When it would snow, he would plow the whole street for this building.”
She recalled to us how one tenant in the building was a handyman, who was afflicted by alcoholism. Drinking throughout the day, the man would be pushed by his friends “down the steps into the basement so that he would pass out and frequently got hurt. It’s amazing they never killed him, and then they’d take his money and leave him there like that. And Joe Gordon put that guy through rehab at least five times before he finally died, and he didn’t die falling down the steps. He did die from his alcohol, but Joe never gave up. Never gave up.”
Stories of friendship and family between the tenants of the Gordon building do not seem to run out. Johnson adds her own to the mix: Gerry Gordan, who inherited both his father’s building and his collection of clowns, bestowed many of his clown statues upon her as she was furnishing Wild Tiger Studios. She often buys herbal remedies for pinched nerves in her neck and finds “every type of Tiger Balm you could imagine” in E Shan Tang, a Chinese herbal healing center on 171 Harvard Avenue.
As Johnson starts to glide golden nail polish onto Fanning’s fingers, she tells us that her two children call the Ritual Arts owner Auntie Toni.
“I don’t know what I would do without her in my life.”
“I feel the same way.”
