Hock heaven.

• Author: Speizer, Irwin
• Position: Pawnshops

They're not high finance, but pawnshops continue to thrive as lenders of last resort.

On one side of Trade Street in downtown Charlotte sits the glass-and-stone tower that houses a high-tech customer-service center for NationsBank. Across the street squats a one-story building with neon signs in the windows offering one of the most ancient and lowest-tech financial services in the world.

CSI Jewelry Exchange is a family-run pawnshop that makes its money on $70-a-pop loans while taking TVs and gold chains as collateral. Most of the time, the loans are paid off. But not always. That's evident from the pistols and diamond rings glittering in the glass cases and stereos and sewing machines lined along the floor. Much of it was once collateral. Now it's for sale.

Phil Brown, 28, runs the business with his father, Troy, 53, catering to customers who can't get what they need from the conventional finance industry. Sometimes their patrons come from across the street. "We get quite a few customers from NationsBank, not only that purchase but that borrow from us," Phil Brown says. "If they need $500 real quick, we can loan it real quick."

Such is the irony of the pawn business, which manages to prosper sometimes quite literally in the shadows of the banking trade in Charlotte. Brown, a regional vice president of the North Carolina Pawnbrokers Association, counts 52 pawnshops in Mecklenburg County, about a sixth of the 300 or so in the state. When he started working with his father a dozen years ago, there were only eight.

Brown runs Charlotte's last downtown pawnshop, and these days, as new office towers and hotels rise around him, he patiently plies his trade while waiting for a big enough offer on his real estate to persuade him to move.

When he's ready, South Boulevard will be waiting. Discovered in the 1980s by pawnbrokers, it is now one of their favorite Charlotte locations. The street has seven pawnshops in a five-mile stretch running south from downtown, most in old storefronts with bumpy asphalt parking lots. The whole spectrum of pawnbroking is represented, from the family shop to the national chain whose stock is traded on Wall Street.

"At the time they moved out there, that area had run down and property was fairly inexpensive to buy," Brown says. "Usually, when one pawnshop goes somewhere, others follow." They tend to congregate the way car dealers do and for much the same reason: Being close to one another generates more traffic. In fact, continuing south on South Boulevard leads to a strip of car dealers. The section the pawnbrokers favor is four lanes lined with older stores and warehouses. It is close to poor neighborhoods, where pawn shops find their best customers.

The favored form of advertising is a red-white-and-blue sign patriotically promoting cash loans. There are variations, such as the orange and green scheme favored by Doc Holliday's, which aims for a western motif by hanging wagon wheels in the windows and covering the inside walls with weathered wooden paneling.

The rapid growth of the pawn business in Charlotte and elsewhere in North Carolina has slowed the last two years as hot towns have reached the saturation point. Pawnbrokers say the proliferation has cut into profit margins. But they note that business and demographic trends bode well for an industry that traces its roots back thousands of years and likes to refer to itself as the world's second-oldest profession. Pawnshops provide a service - small loans requiring no credit checks - offered by nobody else.

"We are an alternative lending institution," says Bobby Stogner, chairman of the National Pawnbrokers Association and owner of the House of Quality Coins, Jewelry and Loans in Lumberton. "A person who doesn't have credit, who can't go to the...