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Treasure Hunting
Philadelphia Home & Garden, Fall/Winter 2004
Spend an autumn weekend sifting through the vintage castoffs
at legendary local indoor-outdoor antiques markets
It’s 10 a.m. on a Saturday and the parking lot next
to Renningers Market’s sprawling wooden structure in Kutztown is already
filled. Attendants are waving the steady stream of arriving cars into an adjacent
field. This is one of the flea market’s three annual “extravaganza weekends,”
when, from Thursday through Saturday, some 1,000 vendors set up shop in the surrounding
fields and under two covered pavilions, adding to the 250 vendors whose inside
booths are open every weekend.
The parked cars’ license plates show just how far people
will come for these fabled events—from Illinois, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts,
Virginia. Renningers is a well-known antiques-market destination, thanks to mentions
in far-reaching publications like Martha Stewart Living, USA Today and The Washington
Post. The crowd browsing the stalls is a mix of locals, antiques dealers, experienced
pickers, young urbanites and suburban couples looking to furnish their starter
homes, and people like my friend and me, here for the atmosphere, to marvel at
the sheer volume of stuff.
Going to an antiques market without a goal in mind is like
going to a supermarket when you’re hungry: You’ll want to buy everything
in sight. At this moment, I wish I had a house with soaring ceilings where I could
use an 8-foot-tall hutch painted robin’s-egg blue ($250). The dealers must
be in on the demand for shabby chic, because the vendor with the hutch also has
a few narrow wooden pantry cabinets painted pale pink and white ($80). Open the
pantry and hutch doors, and you'll find dust and dirt from the farmhouses they
once furnished. A neighboring dealer shows a stack of bamboo steamer trunks, and
more farmhouse furniture is on display up ahead, including pie safes and a squat
yellow butter churner.
With no house to furnish—just a rented one-bedroom apartment
in Center City that is already plenty packed with odds and ends—I pay more
attention to the smaller merchandise. A jewelry dealer has heaps of colorful bangles
and rhinestone flower brooches in glass display cases. I pluck a bracelet from
an open case—it’s black with sterling and marcasite details. The dealer
tells me it’s black jade, which is why it costs $85. She also has delicate
jeweled watches for $20–$30. Some of the plastic bangles, she says, are Bakelite;
some are celluloid. A friend once taught me a trick to tell if something is really
Bakelite: Because the plastic is a mixture of phenol and formaldehyde, it should
smell like formaldehyde if you rub it briskly with your fingers.
Another dealer in vintage clothing and accessories has some
great leopard-print clutches, a rack of 1950s dresses and a faux-crocodile structured
purse. The vendor used to have a store near Valley Forge, but now she sticks to
the flea-market circuit. The sellers here are a mix of retired hobbyists, dealers
with brick-and-mortar stores and those, like the vintage-clothes lady, who sell
exclusively on the road. After an hour or so of browsing and coveting, my friend
and I decide to get something to eat. The food carts are in the middle of the
field, with the rows of vendors spreading out from them like the spokes of a wheel.
On the way, we pass a dealer selling a wooden armchair with Danish modern lines
and a “pleather” seat. It’s a handsome fake, and my friend stops
to look it over. “Forty-five,” the dealer says, but my friend decides
against it. As we walk away, the dealer calls out lower and lower prices, until
he’s reduced to calling out, “Twenty.” My friend still passes—with
our tiny hatchback, we’ve come ill-prepared.
Maybe that was a mistake—price-slashing is the general
mood of the market on Saturday, especially after lunch, when closing time is only
a few short hours away. On this last day of the extravaganza, it seems the dealers
would rather unload their merchandise for cheap than pack it up again and take
it home. A vendor selling a white-painted wooden three-drawer dresser topped with
a swiveling oval mirror sees me looking and offers it for $50. I make a mental
note to come back in a few years with a van on the last day of a Renningers extravaganza.
By then I may have a house to furnish, or know of a little girl who needs a dainty
white dresser. I circle back and buy that crocodile purse.
There’s a second Renningers in Adamstown, which is billed
as “Antiques Capital, U.S.A.” The town’s “antique strip”—Route
272—has seven miles of antique stores, markets and co-ops, but I bypass the
strip on my next antiques-market outing and head for Shupp’s Grove, an open-air
weekly market that is one of Pennsylvania’s oldest (it opened in 1962). On
average, the market has 250 dealers, and up to 500 on extravaganza weekends (which
coincide with Kutztown’s this year: September 23-25).
The vendors set up in the tree shade. On this fall afternoon,
leaves mix with the merchandise on the creaky wooden tables. On a regular weekend,
Shupp’s Grove is much more manageable than the Renningers Market extravaganza,
but there is also less to love. An item that was plentiful at both markets was
the decorative five-point stars that are fashioned from salvaged tin roofing.
A vendor at Shupp’s Grove tells me these stars are a Mennonite craft; they
run from $35 to $250, depending on the size. I also see mirrors made from salvaged
decorative tin ceiling tiles, and, later that week walking down Pine Street, I
see the same mirrors for nearly double the price ($160 compared to $95).
A little closer to Philadelphia is the Golden Nugget Flea
Market (which recently merged with the Lambertville Antique Market) on River Road
(Route 29) in Lambertville. The markets are open year-round, every Wednesday,
Saturday and Sunday, with indoor and outdoor vendors totaling around 300. Maybe
it’s because it’s on a road that’s traveled by many a wealthy antiques
collector, but the prices here seem a little steeper, especially for furniture.
The 1920s wooden medicine cabinets with ceramic or glass knobs that run $40–$50
in Adamstown and Kutztown are $90–$200 here.
Yet a vendor with carved wooden tables from India is also
selling a cedar chest from Afghanistan, painted apple green on the inside, and
decorated on the outside with inlaid mosaic and mirrored chips, for $225. Another
dealer has a large wooden shipping crate with its original label from a New York
port circa 1920. The destination—Old Wheel Inn, Philadelphia—is painted
across its front in faded white paint. Cut a piece of glass for the top, and the
$35 chest would make a quirky coffee table—if you have the space for it.
Personally, I don’t. And I don’t even have a van. So I content myself
with petting the Chewbacca head that’s being sold by a dealer who claims
it was actually used in Star Wars ($325), and buying a 1950s Betty Crocker cookbook
to add to my collection instead.
Sidebar: Flea Marketing Tips from the Pros
DAVID RAGO
Owner, David Rago Auctions, Lambertville
What he collects: American
art ceramics and turn-of-the-century decorative objects and furniture.
Where he shops: “I
cut my teeth at the Lambertville [Antique] Market . I started going there when
I was 16 and continued to go for the next 10 to 12 years,” he says. “When
I was a college student, I lived for it.”
Advice: “Dress like
you have money—this way, the dealers will show you the good stuff. Bring
a magnifying glass. Find out what time the flea opens, and get there an hour beforehand.
The really hard-core are out there shopping before dawn by lantern light. By 8
or 9 a.m., it’s over—all of the good stuff has been snapped up.”
To haggle or not to haggle:
If you’re going to haggle, do your homework first. People are attracted to
flea markets for their easy-money cachet, but if you go just for fun with no goal
in mind and aim to get a bargain, you’ll end up with junk. Even if it’s
expensive, there’s a better chance of getting a good buy because it’s
a flea market. “For me, it’s about getting the $10,000 piece that I
can sell for $12,000.”
Best find: In 1975, at
the Lambertville flea market, “I found a piece of decorated Marblehead Pottery
with a geometric two-color design that today would be worth about $20,000. I bought
it for $125.”
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MARY ANN CARDELLINO
Owner, Blendo, a gift shop on Antique Row that carries
a hodgepodge of vintage and new items
What she collects: Everything
from clothes and accessories to linens, furniture, books and frames—the scope
is reflected by the granny’s-attic atmosphere of her jam-packed store. “I
find that older things are often designed and made better,” she says. “I
look for good style and design.”
Where she shops: The Fairmount
Flea Market that winds around the Eastern State Penitentiary twice a year, as
well as house sales and auctions. She’ll occasionally take a daytrip out
to Adamstown.
Advice: “Try to have
small bills and large bills—if you negotiate a price, you don’t want
to pull out a $20. “ And bring a car that can carry a big load.
To haggle or not to haggle:
“There’s no harm in asking—decide whether it’s worth it to
or not. Value’s a relative thing. Life’s about negotiating, so why not
negotiate at a flea market?”
Best find: A pair of large primitive vases at a market in
London. “We trash-picked packing material so we could carry them with us.
That started my collection of what I now know to be Gouda pottery. I have 30 pieces,
and I would never get rid of those first two.”
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M.E. STER
Owner, ME and Blue, a part-vintage, part-new clothing
and accessories boutique in Philadelphia’s Old City
What she collects: Vintage
clothes and accessories; funky fabrics for her store’s new line of A-line
skirts, and fur collars to refurbish.
Where she shops: “I
get out of town,” says Ster. “I should have a bumper sticker that says,
‘I brake for thrift stores.’” The smaller the town, the better.
“There’s less competition in the boonies for what I’m looking for.”
The only exception to small-town thrifting: Montreuil, a flea market in Paris,
is Ster’s favorite place for vintage finds.
Advice: Know what you’re
looking for. “I have a game plan,” she says. For example, she’s
been looking for tweed and plaid coats to stock the store this fall and winter.
Also, she wears layers so she can try on clothes. “I usually do two once-overs,”
she says. “I check pockets for holes, and lining for rips.”
To haggle or not to haggle:
She doesn’t believe in it. “For the most part, you’re already getting
an amazing deal.”
Best find: A needlepoint
baguette with two cats on it, in amazing condition.
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