From the archives: Flea market seeking new home after raceway buy

This article was originally published in Newsday on Nov. 19, 1994

The winners in this week's deal for the Roosevelt Raceway property were obvious: the new owners, who hope to reap millions from the development of the 172-acre tract in Westbury.

Now some losers are becoming apparent: the people who operate the Roosevelt Raceway Flea Market, which probably now will have to move, or go out of business after 19 years.

The owner of the flea market says he had banked on securing a long-term lease with the new ownership. He even recently posted a sign that still hangs at the front entrance: "Great News. We Will Be Here for Many More Years."

But now, Jack Bergman says, he is hoping only to get an agreement that would require the new owners, MCS Realty Partners, to give him a 120-day notice before he must vacate their land.

"We're negotiating an agreement that would buy us time, but it's not a lease," Bergman said. "We've come to the end of our story here.

"I guess they're trying to develop the piece of land I'll be on. I really can't blame the new owners. It's understandable."

Even before the new owners completed their deal on Thursday, preparations were under way to restrict the flea market's location to the southwest quarter of the property.

A tree-cutting crew spent three days this week taking down more than 60 pines, beeches and cedars so that an entrance to the reconfigured flea market can be built.

In a steady rain yesterday, tree surgeon John Ramalho lowered the toothy disc of his stump-removal machine into the ground as his workers took chainsaws to a row of shaggy cedar trees near the main entrance to the grandstand.

"Seventy-five percent of these were junk trees, or not taken care of," Ramalho said.

With the flea market squeezed into one corner, the developers can begin their projects in the northwest and southeast quarters of the property.

So far, Roosevelt Centre - as the project is called - is to include the Tandy Corp.'s 185,000-square-foot Incredible Universe store, a 127,000-square-foot Home Depot Expo Design Center and a multi-screen movie-theater complex.

The new owners said this week that they expect to develop the entire property. Bergman said his only viable alternative is to move the flea market to the parking lot of the Nassau Coliseum.

"We've been looking for four or five years, and there is simply no other suitable location," Bergman said.

The lease between the coliseum's management company and the county, however, bars flea markets from the property, said Lance Elder, assistant general manager at the coliseum.

Any change to the lease would require the approval of the Nassau County Board of Supervisors, said David Vieser, county spokesman.

Despite the lease restrictions, Elder said coliseum managers might be interested in getting the flea market. The market would have to be smaller to relocate to the arena property, Elder said, and it's unclear whether the coliseum could accommodate the market two days a week, as it now operates.