An introductory and idiosyncratic guide to flea markets

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Nostalgia hung heavy in the air on the final day. As recounted in the New York Times, “Andy Warhol would arrive at the flea markets on the West Side of Manhattan before noon on Sundays in an old Dodge convertible. It was the 1980s, and on weekends, the parking lots near West 25th Street and Sixth Avenue were filled with vendors selling tchotchkes, collectibles and fine antiques.

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Housed in the old biscuit factory where Oreo cookies were invented, and residing under the same roof as Google offices, Chelsea Market is New York’s number one food destination, and for very good reason!

Welcoming some six million visitors each year, the warehouse takes up a full square block in the trendy Meatpacking District.

An introductory and idiosyncratic guide to flea markets 

 Know your vendors 

For friends and preferred customers, a vendor will often not only set aside objects but, during the week, will look for objects in estates and elsewhere that those customers collect. Vendors rarely have all their offerings at the flea market, with many keeping the greater share in storage facilities. If you are friendly with a vendor, they may allow you into those facilities. Finally, a vendor with whom you are friendly will give you a price on objects that is not available to others. 

Know your pickers 

Pickers are those at the flea market who are buying to resell to dealers or online. The value of the picker is that he or she will have expertise in a specific subject, which means that if you are trying to identify an obscure mark on a ceramic plate or to decide whether a painting is from the 17th century or a copy, or if you are wondering whether a necklace is real or costume, a picker ought to be able to give you an immediate answer. To find the right picker, ask a vendor. 

Items at the Chelsea Flea Market in July 2014. (Photo by Larry Baumhor)

French singer France Gall in a New York flea market, 1970s © Paris Match via Getty Images 

Turnover should be healthy 

The size of a flea market is less important than the frequency with which the objects in the flea market turnover. The ideal flea market has a high rate of turnover, maximising the chance that you will find the objects you are searching for and minimising the time that the vendor has to understand what they are selling.

 The random factor 

Flea markets have intrinsic dispositions, so while you may enter certain of what you want to find, allow the flea market to introduce you to new and more fruitful categories. Also, one of the fascinations of the flea market, as the Surrealists noted, is the random juxtaposition of objects — it is a dreamscape, opening the mind to new and poetic areas. Take a notebook.

 Defects mean discounts 

For those buying vintage clothing, make certain that zippers work, that there are no moth holes, and that wear on the sleeves and collars is minimal. Any of these, pointed out to the vendor, should cause the vendor to drop the price.

The Chelsea ‘flea’ and me: memories of the famous 

New York market In an extract from his memoir, writer and collector Michael Rips recalls its heyday 

Michael Rips NOVEMBER 27 2020 2 

For four decades, a parking garage, festering and fetid, in Chelsea, a neighbourhood in Manhattan, drew crowds that included Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, Catherine Deneuve, Michael Jackson, art dealers, junk dealers (both kinds), fashion editors, models, ravers leaving nearby clubs at 6am and poets. The attraction was a flea market of brilliantly odd vendors and their objects. 

They are the subject of my memoir The Golden Flea. In the summer of 2014, the garage closed but many of the vendors moved down 25th Street to a parking lot between Sixth Avenue and Broadway. The market lost its lease in December 2019, but as of September it is open Saturdays and Sundays

The garage had two floors. On each, 25 to 30 booths ran along the brick walls, and 20 booths were set up in the centre. In all, there were 100 vendors, offering paintings, lithographs and photographs, ceramic vases, silver trays, models of ancient ships from museum gift shops, boxes of cufflinks, sports memorabilia. And throughout there were stacks of crumbling newspapers and magazines.

Oil and gasoline pooled on the floors from the cars parked and serviced in the parking garage during the week. When it rained greatly, shards of paint and filth fell on to the booths and sewage backed up through the drains. Fluorescent lights and asbestos hung loosely from the ceiling, and nails protruded from the walls, hammered there by vendors to display paintings. 

With no heat, vendors warmed themselves with coffee and layers of coats. Nonetheless, the concrete walls seemed capable of withstanding any assault, and the pipes that lined the walls did well as supports for vintage clothes, tablecloths, stall signs and anything else that couldn’t fit on the crowded floors.

Beyond the garage was a constellation of open-air parking lots, which were also rented out to vendors on the weekends. There were three large lots on Sixth Avenue between 23rd and 27th Streets. Down Sixth Avenue, between 16th and 17th Streets, was another lot; this was the smallest of the lots and was, typically, the last that a buyer would visit. 

On 25th Street, next to a large church (once Episcopalian, now Serbian), was another parking lot used as a flea market on the weekends. Edith Wharton (then Edith Jones) was married in the church. Visitors to certain lots on Sixth Avenue were required to pay a fee to get in, usually a dollar.

 The lot next to the church required the same. If, however, you wanted to get in before 9am, the fee was $5. Early access meant that the buyer would get a first look at what was being sold. Some lots opened as early as five or six in the morning. Vendors who arrived at that time traded goods with each other. 

A concentration of art, furniture and antiques in New York means that inevitably some valuable objects emerge at Chelsea 

In the 1970s and 1980s, as the garment industry evaporated, a cataract of underground clubs, artists, writers and junkies flowed into the neighbourhood. At the same time, with the price of real estate rising in the West Village, gays and lesbians moved into Chelsea, which was nearby and more affordable. Gay bars and sex shops filled Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith took up residence in the Chelsea Hotel in 1969.

The flea market was a meeting place for the various groups filling Chelsea: rare yet inexpensive items could be found to fill their apartments, artists took inspiration from the accidental combinations of objects, and those who were leaving the clubs and bars in the early morning had a place to go before returning home. 

People dressed in outlandish costume just to attend the flea market. It was a place to display and create oneself, a diorama of drag and exoticism.

Vendors, whether in the garage, open lots or converted buildings of Chelsea, paid a fee to sell their goods. Those who did not wish to pay a fee could set up on the sidewalk on Sixth Avenue between 23rd and 25th Streets. This constellation of second-hand markets was known by New Yorkers and to a host of others as “the flea”. Many who came were familiar with similar markets in Paris and London, and many were dealers. It may have been one of the largest flea markets in America. 

It was certainly among the best known, and widely regarded for the treasures to be found there. In the 1920s, the Surrealist writer André Breton was walking daily through the Paris flea markets, which he refers to in Nadja and L’Amour Fou. Man Ray created sculptures from what he found in flea markets, including the neck of a double bass. 

With its deracinated objects and their unexpected juxtapositions, the flea awakened the mind to new impressions of the world. The same atmosphere was found in the Chelsea flea, and it drew a similar crowd.

More recently, for “pickers” — those who buy and then resell to a gallery, collector or over the internet — the Chelsea flea was the most exciting, most profitable flea market in the country. The reason is that the concentration of art, furniture and antiques in New York creates the possibility that valuable objects will, with some regularity, turn up.  

Not long ago, the British journalist Anthony Haden-Guest discovered that his art collection had been sold off by a New York company when he was late in paying $1,350 in storage fees. This is a common path objects take to the flea. The collection included paintings by David Salle and Donald Baechler. A David Salle recently sold for nearly $1m. 

Chelsea Flea Market

“It was a Sunday ritual for my first decade in New York City to have breakfast in the Meatpacking District at Florent (which also closed) and then head north to the Chelsea Flea. We would do the outdoor parking lots first and then eventually head indoors to the Garage on 25th Street. The people watching was as interesting as the furniture shopping and would never disappoint. The challenge back then, pre-Uber, was how do I get ‘it’ home, whatever ‘it’ was—a bicycle, a sofa, vintage clothes, or art. Part of the adventure was getting on the subway carrying odd things back to my apartment in Brooklyn (like the ‘lost Kandinsky,’ which I swore was going to end up being the real thing and worth $40 million). My first two apartments were furnished primarily with things from the flea market. Call me nostalgic, but I’m always saddened when cool, quirky, and unique places like this close their doors, perhaps because I didn’t move to New York City for cookie cutter.”

The now-defunct Chelsea Flea.

Photo: Jeff Greenberg / Getty Images