THE SCENE : The Young and the Rest Home

Just down the street from Retail Slut on Melrose, blissfully out of place, stands the Golden Age Retirement Hotel. Its vast living room fronts the avenue of the young and restless, picture windows turning the spot into a through-the-looking-glass diorama.

Charlie Buckbinder, 83, often pulls up a porch seat, reads his paper and surveys the passing exotic tableaux--a man and his Great Dane in matching leather harness and collar, a family riding a Harley-Davidson. “It’s a show,” says Buckbinder, who moved into the Golden Age in 1986. “But after a couple of years, I’m bored. I’ve seen everything.”

Across the street, youthful diners on the patio at Johnny Rockets seem oblivious to the home and its inescapable message: This will happen to you. The two worlds seldom collide, says Golden Age owner Sol Feiner, whose parents built the 60-room home in 1972.

“For the most part, young people can’t relate to what this place is about,” says Feiner, as a blue-Mohawked punk bums a smoke off a tenant sitting on the porch.

But the leather-and-lace crowd does provide a diversion for the 75 residents. “Before, people all dressed the same and the shops were dull,” says Joe Kalman, 82. “Now it kinda gives me a jolt just to look out the window. It reminds me I’m alive.”