Pasadena’s Flea Market One of Nation’s Largest : A Super Bowl Between Buyers, Sellers
As flea markets go, the once-a-month event at the Rose Bowl has evolved into a Southern California hybrid somewhere between a Middle East bazaar and an old-fashioned American yard sale.
On Sunday, 20,000 visitors surged around about 1,500 vendors hawking everything from $30 trench coats said to be worn by the West German army two decades ago to four-for-a-buck plastic jewelry bracelets.
It’s also the second-Sunday-of-every-month place where collectors can get a full dose of Americana in the form of a turn-of-the-century wooden washing machine, a half-century-old eggbeater or a 100-year-old Mason jar.
Glitzy, schlocky-- yes, some of it is. But it’s also nostalgic and a genuine slice of U.S.A., the way it was, and the way we think it was.
And, most of all, it’s a piece of low-key entertainment on a lazy Southern California Sunday.
“It’s fun, it’s like a fair,” said Brenda, a woman selling jewelry.
“I go to flea markets every weekend,” said Lisa Eisner, 28, a recently transplanted New Yorker sorting through a nearby clothing stall. “There are really great bargains.”
Eisner pointed to black English riding boots she was wearing--bought at a flea market, naturally. “Twenty dollars,” she said, “and they would have cost $150 on Melrose.”
Flea markets, essentially open-air marketplaces where, it would seem, practically anything ever fashioned by human hand is on sale, are old hat in other parts of the world, such as in Europe, where they have been thriving for many generations.
But the American version apparently did not begin to take root until well after World War II. Now, each section of the country has a handful of flea markets that have made their mark.
And the Rose Bowl market in Pasadena is considered one of the nation’s largest and most successful.
“We originally started with car shows,” said Bill Thunell, 44, vice president of R.G. Canning Enterprises Inc., a Maywood-based, privately held firm that operates the Rose Bowl event and three others like it in Ventura, San Bernardino and Bakersfield.
Then, said the bearded Thunell (“My wife and I are heavy antique collectors, soda fountain and country store stuff, Victorian furniture”), the idea of a flea market began to surface at the Rose Bowl, where he and Canning had attended auto rallies.
At first, said Thunell, formerly a salesman for a gasket company, his sidekick, Richard Gary Canning, would not buy the idea.
“Canning didn’t believe people would buy that stuff,” he said.
For his part, the 45-year-old flea market mogul, Canning, formerly in the hardware business, would not comment on his success Sunday. He declined to meet with a reporter. Associates said Canning, the firm’s chief executive, is gun shy with journalists.
Whatever the case, it can be said that the Rose Bowl Flea Market is enormously popular, drawing as many as 40,000 visitors and about 2,000 vendors on a given Sunday during the December holiday season, and not very much less the rest of the year.
In fact, so successful is the event, according to Mary Bradley, Pasadena deputy finance director, that revenues from the flea market underwrite the tab for the maintenance of the Brookside Park area next to the famous stadium.
Pasadena, she said, gets 30% of vendor receipts (ranging from $40 to $90 for a sales area) and 35% of the $3.50 admission price. As a result, in the last fiscal year, the once-a-month flea market generated $450,000 for the city.
“It’s a very sound moneymaker,” she said in a slightly understated tone.
Most of the vendors who sell everyday goods are clustered around the perimeter of the Rose Bowl while the collectible crowd has the parking lot to the west.
The merchandise in the two areas is dramatically different.
Among the collectibles a reporter encountered on Sunday:
- A 50-year-old radio with a wooden cabinet for $80. Seller Angela Hampt of Pomona said it had upside-down tubes. “I don’t know why,” she said.
Driver Monitor
- A “motion detector,” a kind of Rube Goldberg clock invention of several decades ago that kept a wary eye on truck drivers who took long coffee breaks. When the truck stopped, the motion detector’s mechanism stopped, too, said Jim Witherell of Oxnard, who was selling the device for $15.
- Fruit jars of several beautiful hues, some a century old. “It was thought that the darker colors protected food (from contamination),” said seller Gary Johnston of Fontana. “It was a fallacy, though.”
- Wagon wheels that helped win the West. “They’re the ones that crossed the plains,” said Carl Johnson of Phoenix, Ariz., whose wheels had price tags up to several hundred dollars.
And over in the “basement sale” area of the market, Jill Harden of Pasadena was ecstatic over a pair of pricey, in-crowd Reebok shoes, which she had just found for $29.99.
“They’re a lot cheaper than $40 in a store,” she said holding up the sneakers. “But (here) you never know if they’re real. You just have to take a chance.”
