NEW YORK — The CBS fantasy-mystery “God Friended Me” rented computers that were cutting-edge machines in the now-ancient era of 15 or 20 years ago. The Netflix prison drama “Orange Is the New Black” also found obsolete computers, and a Canadian program called “Vintage Tech Hunters” located the particular PlayStation video game console from the 1990s that it had been hunting for.
A blocky recycling-center warehouse in Brooklyn has become a go-to destination for producers and set decorators searching for computers that have been swept into the dustbin of tech history. The warehouse has a prop shop that provides an afterlife for old electronic devices, renting them to movie and television studios when scripts call for a period look.
“It’s a wonderful and weird backroom gold mine if you know what you’re looking for,” said David Lerech, an executive producer of “Vintage Tech Hunters.” “You get some diamonds in the rough if you search through the place. There’s stuff of real value — you just have to know what you’re looking for.”
All of it was brought in by the original owners, who probably figured it would be recycled, with the plastic cases, circuit boards and components separated to be crushed or melted, and used again.
Instead, someone’s ancient Compaq portable, a machine the size of a suitcase — or an Apple IIE or an even older RCA New Vista television, from when color sets were just catching on — could end up making the smallest of cameo appearances.
The center is run by the Lower East Side Ecology Center, a longtime promoter of recycling and composting. Christine Datz-Romero, a founder of the center, hit upon the idea of renting out items that had been dropped off for recycling several years ago, when a stage-set operation was down the block. Set designers were often sent her way when they needed authentic-looking finishing touches: a vintage clock, perhaps, or a rotary telephone.
The center began setting aside some still-serviceable items as potential props. The plan was to recycle them, but not immediately. They would be reused first.
The result was a prop shop that is one part lending library, one part wonderland, at least for tech-minded types and set decorators.
“I’ve gone there on other shows when I needed quantities of electronics to dress shelves or for a store or a backroom in an office, things that don’t really have to work but maybe they just light up,” said Lee Malecki, a veteran set director currently working on “Orange Is the New Black.”
Once she found an office copier — a machine so large it was on wheels — that someone had donated because it was obsolete. Another time, she needed old-fashioned wall phones — “the rotary kind that you had in your kitchen when you were growing up.”
More recently, when she needed to put computers in the background, technicians who work at the recycling center put five systems together from monitors and keyboards on hand. “I needed things to look alike,” Malecki said. “They were able to salvage from their donations enough pieces to make it work.”
Lee Orvieto, an assistant set decorator for “God Friended Me,” turned to the warehouse when a flashback scene called for computers the characters would have used in 2005. He figured the machines he needed would have been manufactured as early as 1998. He found “a ton of old Mac stuff” that fit the bill, including three monitors.
“Their stuff tends to be more interesting-looking on camera,” he said. “It’s sculptural. They asked me if I needed the stuff to work.” He said the monitors only needed to look as if they were functioning. “Any stage of operation” would do, he said.
Walking down the prop aisles in the warehouse is like walking into a time warp from the days when “Three’s Company” and “Dallas” dominated the television ratings and “Apocalypse Now” and “Alien” made money at the box office. Those were the days when televisions still had tubes, cameras still used film and typewriters, not computers, still sat on desks in most offices.
“I like going there because I see all these things from my childhood,” said Orvieto, 50. “They have a radio that I remember my dad had, a portable Zenith. It’s a piece from the 60s. And they have video games all the way back to the Atari 2600, which was the original one, released in ’77 that I got for Christmas in ’78.” Some gamers revere it as the prototype of modern video game systems.
But games are not all the warehouse has. There are cassette recorders and machines from the days of open-reel tape, for example.
There are Kodak Instamatic cameras, which had to be loaded with film cartridges, a 1960s improvement over roll-film cameras that had long foiled fumble-fingered photographers. There are Kodak Carousel projectors that probably showed slides shot on the Instamatics.
The ecology center’s beginnings date to the 1980s, but the emphasis was on recycling plastics and paper until 2003. “That’s when we stumbled on electronics recycling” during a city-commissioned project to identify ways to prevent waste, Datz-Romero said.
She realized that she had bought her first computer in 1990, only to upgrade it several years later. By the time she was working on the waste-prevention study, “My Mac Classic was sitting on the bookshelf. I was like, ‘Everyone has a closet with things they just don’t throw out.'”
She said the city was not interested in collecting electronic waste at the time, so the ecology center began staging collection events around the city. The center worked with a recycler hired to scrub personal data from machines that people dropped off.
“People brought things that looked better than the computers we used in our offices,” she recalled.
The center now collects electronics at events in parks around the city, usually on Saturdays. People looking to get rid of electronics can also take them to the warehouse in Brooklyn, which opened in 2012, after state lawmakers passed an electronics recycling law.
Troy Hanna, a former licensed practical nurse who is a reuse technician at the warehouse, said the producers do not tell him and Datz-Romero what episodes they use the equipment in, and sometimes finds from the warehouse end up on the cutting room floor. Lerech of “Vintage Tech Hunters” said that is what happened to the PlayStation.
But sometimes Hanna catches a glimpse of something familiar — a typewriter, for example, or a television set. Consider an NBC News segment last summer about the last Blockbuster video-rental store in the country.
The store was in Oregon, but to show relics of the Blockbuster era, a television set with knobs and a videocassette recorder, the camera crew went to Brooklyn and the warehouse. And the camera caught something besides the TV and VCR.
“That’s my hand,” Hanna said, pointing to the fingers turning on the TV and pushing the “play” button on the VCR. “So now my hand is famous.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.