No keys for this girl. Hell's Kitchen Flea Market!

For my inaugural NYC exploration post I decided to go with something a little off of my beaten path, but not too obscure: the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market. It’s not like those traveling markets with look-a-like jewelry and shish kebab stands. This market is always in the same place and is full of unique jewelry, tons of random knick knacks, leather goods and fur coats, ethnic goods, antique cameras, records, trunks, and who knows what else can be found. Technically the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market refers to 3 different markets: the major one is the Hell’s Kitchen Flea, all outdoor, tons of vendors, but you can wander downtown a bit and hit up the Antiques Garage, an indoor market, and then finally the West 25^th Street Market, which mostly resembled a junkyard, both looking and smelling. I definitely went for too much on day one.  I can’t say I really got the full Antiques Garage experience since my feet were yelling at me from the second I walked in—as promised, I walked over to the HKFM and all the way down to 25^th (and back!).  So I’m just going to focus on the HKFM. 

A little history and geography: 

The original market was started in 1976, with only 11 vendors, in a lot in Chelsea.  It was around for 30 years, known as The Annex Antiques Fair & Flea Market, but in 2006, an apartment building displaced the market and the owner decided to break it up into three pieces. The Antiques Garage and West 25^th Street Market were moved to 25^th street between Broadway and 7^th avenues, but the big outdoor market was moved up into Hell’s Kitchen, now residing on 39^th between 9^th and 10^th avenues.  Now onto the geography lesson.  For those of you who don’t know where Hell’s Kitchen actually begins and ends (I didn’t), here is a little map. The area goes from (roughly) 34^th-57^th starting at 8^th avenue and reaching all the way to the river.  It is north of Chelsea and south of, in the most general sense, the Upper West Side.  There are some other opinions on where the actual boundaries are and of course there is overlap when you bring in Midtown West and Clinton, but we’ll just focus on the HK we find on Wikipedia.  There is also no agreed upon etymology of the name Hell’s Kitchen, which is unfortunate, because I’m really into that stuff.  But anyway, onto the day!

You’ll know you’ve arrived when you see the giant blow up devil boy, complete with triton, who welcomes you at the entrance.  Does anyone know where this comes from??  He’s cute and scary at the same time.  

At first there only look to be a few vendors nicely arrange in a straight line, but once you really get in there you realize there are tons of tables arranged with no logical path to stick to (think first scene in Aladdin, but fewer swords and no food).  So just go at it! There is definitely a lot of junk to sift through and lots of copycat stuff, but some really fun tables. My favorites are the knick knacks—one of the first booths you see when you enter the main area had a pretty wooden square with a star protruding from the middle of it, which I thought would be great to hang up for decoration…and it got even better when the vendor explained to me that it was used as a mold to make star shaped Christmas ornaments.  I’m sorta mad I didn’t get it, but it was so early in my journey I wanted to see more before buying anything. (Maybe it’ll still be there next weekend…)

Haggling efforts thwarted:

One vendor had boxes of hundreds of old keys and I thought hmm…wouldn’t it be cool to fill a decorative bowl with antique keys instead of fake rocks from Pier 1? It was genius. So the keys were listed as $5 each—ridiculous right? I think this is just a starting point for haggling. So I am feeling pretty confident I’ll get this guy down, I spend a few minutes picking out the 10 keys that I want and I hold them out to him and say “how about 5 dollars for all these keys?” (that’s 50cents a key). He literally laughs in my face. “not in a million years.” (Ok, so that was a low offer, it’s just part of the game). So I up it to $1 per key thinking it would be a fair deal, or maybe I’d go to $1.50/key and pay $15 for the 10 keys. Well, I might as well have called his mother a whore. At this point he gets offended and angry, telling me that these are rare keys (that he has 100+ of) and you can’t find keys like that anymore and not on his deathbed would he sell them for a dollar a piece and that I was crazy…and then he walked away.  I couldn’t even try for $2/key. This man hates me. Utter failure. No keys for this girl. 

Haggling success:

I don’t think it’s super common for people who visit this market to go home with African masks, but I just really loved them. There was a big tarp laid out with all of these really cool wooden masks and figurines. I asked the vendor what the story was behind all of his goods and he told me that he brings them in from Africa and they are all from different parts of the continent (Ivory Cost, Congo, Gabon, Nigeria were some that he pointed out). Now you can choose whether or not to believe him but he seemed pretty authentic to me…since I could barely understand him through his 1 ½ teeth and heavy accent.  I found these two masks that seemed to be a pair and just kept coming back to them.  The initial rate per mask was apparently $35, but I brought him down to $40 for the pair – not bad right? They are about the size of my palm…one is a man and one is a woman. He told me they are from the Ivory Coast and the masks used to be a form of identification, like a passport.  So when traveling, you would show this wooden face as your ID. They don’t have enough wear and tear to actually have been used this way, but the idea is there. I did some research and more or less confirmed what he had to say. They actually are referred to as passport masks. Pretty rad. Solid purchase.

All in all I really enjoyed the flea market and will definitely be returning.  It’s a great place to spend the day with some good friends who are happy to each roam free and meet up randomly to compare purchases.  There is a lot of great jewelry that I didn’t have enough time to really comb through and I am definitely thinking of stopping in again before Christmas for some cool one-of-a-kind gifts…and to spend some more time on the vintage purses.  And maybe I’ll try the key man again, but this time I’ll start with a more respectful bid.