You thought you were shopping, but really, you were treasure-hunting. Such was the appeal of flea markets in the days before eBay, when you might not go searching for anything in particular but were open to surprise finds. Even when nothing interesting turned up, it was never a wasted foray since you were there with family or friends doing something together.
Flea markets still exist, of course, but not in the size and number they used to. And with the internet making even mom-and-pop vendors as aware as antiques professionals what their wares are worth, it’s harder to find a bargain. But back in the day, flea markets like these five helped give Long Islanders some wonderful weekends.
ROOSEVELT RACEWAY FLEA MARKET
Old Country Road, Westbury
Touted as the nation’s largest flea market, it held anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 vendors each Wednesday and Sunday it operated, attracting as many as 30,000 people to its 172 acres. Opened in 1977, it stood in the parking lot of what had been a 1930s auto racetrack, complete with grandstand, that switched to harness racing from 1940 to 1988.
The Roosevelt Raceway flea market in April 1981. Credit: Newsday/Alan Raia
“My parents started schlepping us there on Sundays in the '70s,” remembers Andrew Arnell, 55, who grew up in Merrick and now lives outside Philadelphia. “My first memories of it were of how much hustle and bustle there was in this sort of town within a town.”
Arnell, now a director at the nonprofit HC Opportunity Center, which helps finds employment for adults with developmental disabilities, says he would “chase down comic books or baseball cards or records and then tapes as it went on. It was just so much fun. You would get to know some of the vendors. You’d get to know the guy in the parking lot directing traffic doing roller-skating moves and disco dancing.”
Many people, indeed, got to know John Williams Jr., who became a local star for his graceful choreography and his ability to turn grumpy drivers into eager spectators — earning an admiring write-up in The New York Times. And then once inside the grounds, many people would remember the pickle man.
“Munch a crunchy pickle while you walk!’ That was something he always said,” Arnell recalls. “It was a monster sour pickle they would throw on a stick” like a corndog, “and no matter how many napkins they gave you,” he adds, chuckling, “there’d be pickle juice running down your arm!”
The flea market outlasted the harness racing, not closing until 1995. The 91-acre grandstand remained through 2000, when it was demolished. The Gallery at Westbury Plaza now occupies the overall site.
CENTURY’S 110 DRIVE-IN THEATRE FLEA MARKET
288 Broadhollow Road, Melville
A spinoff of the Century chain that once operated about a dozen Long Island movie theaters, Century’s 110 Drive-In opened in July 1956 as what news accounts of the time called the Island’s largest outdoor cinema, with space for 2,500 cars. In May 1971, new owners instituted a flea market on Sunday mornings and afternoons, later adding Wednesdays from noon to 5 p.m.
An ad for Century's 110 Drive-in flea market in August 1973. Credit: Newsday
“My father would take us,” recalls Glenn Andreiev, 63, a film historian and documentary filmmaker raised in East Northport now living in Kings Park. His dad, an aeronautics engineer at Grumman, would buy science-fiction paperbacks. In much the same vein, Andreiev gravitated to Warren Publishing’s black-and-white horror-comics magazines like “Creepy” and “Eerie” and the same publisher’s nonfiction “Famous Monsters of Filmland,” which focused on horror movies.
Century's 110 Drive-In Theatre, on Route 110 just northwest of the Long Island Expressway interchange, in August 1972. The drive-in had room for 2,700 cars, and the 42-acre property also hosted the largest flea market on Long Island. Credit: Newsday/Bob Luckey
His parents, he says, would tell him and his older sister to “‘Meet us here at the admissions booth in an hour,’ and I'd spend that hour at the ‘Famous Monsters’ table, just perusing which ones I should get that day.”
The 110 Flea Market “had everything from clothes to car parts,” remembers Smithtown’s Luciano Apadula, 57, owner of Greenhouse Antiques in St. James. As a kid with his parents he would “walk around, have a sausage and pepper hero and look for toys while my parents were looking for other stuff. ... The best thing I remember picking up there was an Evel Knievel windup” action figure and motorcycle, based on the real-life stunt performer.
Both the flea market and the theater lasted through July 1976. The site, filling part of the triangle abutting North Service Road between Walt Whitman Road and Broadhollow Road, is now that of a Marriot hotel and of the Leviton Manufacturing Company’s global headquarters.
But the 110 Flea Market would live on, as the...
REPUBLIC AIRPORT FLEA MARKET
Route 110 and Conklin Street, East Farmingdale
Shortly after closing in Melville, the 110 Flea Market reopened in Republic Airport’s Hangar 1. Boasting more than 500 vendors and parking space for more than 2,000 cars, it opened generally two days a week, Saturday and Sunday, and offered an indoor location “open rain or snow” as well as outdoor vendors. It later moved to an old manufacturing building north of Conklin Street.
Designer jeans for sale at the Repbulic Flea Market in Farmingdale in June 1980. Credit: Newsday/John H. Cornell, Jr.
Then in late 1987, the New York State Department of Transportation, the flea market’s landlord, made plans to have developers lease the 12½-acre property on which the building sat, calculating that this could bring in ten times the market’s $50,000 yearly rent. “What we make from the flea market is less than the maintenance cost,” the airport director, Hugh Jones, told Newsday at the time.
The flea market’s operators negotiated three short lease extensions before then DOT said no more. Republic Airport’s flea-market foray closed Oct. 2, 1988.
VALLEY STREAM FLEA MARKET
750 W. Sunrise Hwy., Valley Stream
Another flea market on the grounds of a drive-in theater, this one opened around. 1969 as the Sunrise Drive-in Swap-n-Shop Flea Market. The theater itself had been the first drive-in in New York State, opening in 1938. And even after it was demolished in 1979 to make way for the now-gone Sunrise Multiplex Cinemas, the flea market continued in the parking lot behind it.
An ad for the flea market at the Sunrise Drive-in Theatre in Valley Stream in November 1977. Credit: Newsday
It would keep on going for decades more, held generally three or four days a week but sometimes just once a week during winter. Then in 2013 the property was sold to a development company, and the flea market’s lease ran out on Oct. 26 the following year. The site, now part of Green Acres Commons, adjacent to Green Acres, today houses business including 24 Hour Fitness, Citizens Bank and Cold Stone Creamery.
BUSY BEE
It was a different kind of flea market in that it was held exclusively indoors, three days a week at a building labeled Busy Bee Mall. With vendor tables rather than stores, it was what one account of the time called “a souped-up flea market or a dressed-down shopping mall, depending on your outlook.”
Initially at 2501 Hempstead Tpke. in East Meadow in 1981, Busy Bee by the following year had opened two more locations: one at 4250 Jerusalem Avenue in Massapequa and another at 5300 Sunrise Hwy. in Massapequa Park, at the site of a former Mays department store. That last one lasted longest, through January 2000.
It's the one Arnell went to in the 1980s during his teens, “My friends and I we used to take the bus to Sunrise Mall, and it passed right by,” he says. “So one day we stopped and it was: Pizza! And hot dogs! And bubble hockey and comics and cassette tapes and posters — sold! So, yeah, we would go there quite often.”
Busy Bee Associates filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 1999 and the building was sold to Kohl’s. That department-store chain opened at the site in October 2000 and remains there still.
