“You see, there are three types of customers: some, you tell them the price and they walk away; others, you tell them the price and they say ‘okay, that seems reasonable’; and the third, you tell them the price and they try to haggle with you,” my father explained to my research partner and me at the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market last Saturday. The third customer was the topic of our observational study on gender and haggling behavior for our sociology major requirement, Methods for Social Research. For me, choosing the flea market as a site for field research was the perfect excuse to hang out with my dad all Saturday as he sold records to this strange underbelly of New York culture.
I grew up in the Bay Area with divorced parents. When I was five my father was involved in a car crash that permanently damaged his neck and forced him to give up his career as a carpenter. Falling deeper and deeper into debt with expensive Bay Area prices, medical bills, and no salary, he started selling his possessions—old furniture and his collection of vinyl—for some extra cash. Selling turned to buying-and-selling, and soon he was a full time record dealer and flea market vendor. He moved back to his hometown in upstate New York and began selling at New York City flea markets on weekends to support himself.
Meanwhile, I grew up in the San Francisco suburbs, attended prep school, and soon was immersed in a Silicon Valley culture of Juicy Couture and BMWs. Distance-wise, my father was a country away, but culturally, he was in another universe.
Now, as a young adult, I am living in the same state as my father for the first time in fifteen years. My dad, whose visits I would eagerly anticipate as a kid, is only a subway ride away every Saturday and Sunday. And while he is still in an entirely different socio-economic bracket from both me and most of my college friends, the sudden hipster interest in vinyl and vintage clothing has made my father a relatively cool figure at Fort Greene and DUMBO flea markets.
As a sociology major, I have found myself interested in the flea market in a new intellectual level. I am using the flea market as a topic of study for Methods for Social Research, and I am planning on writing my term paper for Sociology of the Arts on “the retro aesthetic.” My new anthropological “tool kit” permits me to view the flea market with an ethnographic lens, for better or worse. “The Garage”—as the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market is referred to—is an ethnographer’s paradise, with no shortage of characters (last weekend I spotted an old man with a death hawk and a severely overweight man in a velour jumpsuit that read “All this and brains too”), and an intricate “dealer code” which guides transactions between flea market vendors.
My father sets up with a motley crew of guys that sell similar merchandise (or “merch”)—concert posters, old books and magazines, patches and pins, sunglasses, and vinyl. I recently found out one of his fellow vendors is Nigerian royalty. Apparently, a few weeks ago, two men in suits approached their table and arrested him without explanation. The next week he was back, and none of the vendors even bothered to ask him what happened. As my father put it, “I mean, it’s the flea market—what goes down is already so close to the line of legality, it’s just like… these things happen, you know?”
Every time I visit my father, I meet a new group of fellow vendors who are surprised at my existence. “Wait, Will… You have a daughter? She’s 19? She goes to an Ivy League school? How did that happen?” It is strange to be the remnant of my father’s former (and significantly more “normal”) life as a carpenter in the Bay Area, but I can’t complain about my experience as the daughter of a flea market vendor. I boast an impressive vinyl collection and bragging rights to the fact that my dad is “one of the foremost vendors of 8-track tapes in America” (impossible to prove, but most likely true). Columbia aims to cultivate cultural knowledge (read: cultural capital) in its students with Lit Hum and Music Hum, but what I really appreciate about our location in New York City is that every weekend I can choose to hop the 1 to the Garage, get a healthy dose of subculture, and a few new punk 45s.
The author is a Columbia College sophomore. She is the Spectator food and drink editor.
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