[W]here Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag and Greta Garbo once wandered through the flea markets along a four-block stretch of Avenue of the Americas stuffed with more than 700 hustler’s booths, there is now only the Antiques Garage, home to 100 booths on a busy weekend. And the clock is ticking for the Garage as well.
The Garage, a two-story playland of antique ephemera, was set to close at the end of the month to make way for development, a victim of the Chelsea gentrification that it helped usher in. But this week, its founder announced that it would be able to stay on a bit longer, after agreeing to a new month-to-month lease.
via www.nytimes.com
The sterilizing, corporatizing, small business-obliterating, middle-class squeezing gentrification of Manhattan has been well underway for nearly 20 years now, and The Garage--a weekend indoor flea market set up in a 2-story parking garage--is one of the last holdouts in Chelsea, a neighborhood roughly between W. 28th St. and W. 14th St. and between Broadway and the Hudson River). But, its days are numbered.
From the article:
The [Garage's] second floor often feels less frenetic than downstairs, but customers can find an eclectic mix of merchandise, from fabric, statuary and paintings like these to 17th-century works on paper.
(Image: Photo by Yana Paskova for The New York Times; caption:
Kanae Matsuda shops for vintage mirrors amid the paintings, prints, jewelry, handbags, rugs, fabrics and furniture available on two floors of the garage, on 25th Street between Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue.")
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