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Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market

After 29 years in Chelsea, The Annex Antiques Fair & Flea Market, which had been located on a parking lot on Sixth Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets, relocated to 39th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues in Hell’s Kitchen — another victim of displacement by real estate developers. Flea market founder Alan Boss was not entirely happy about the move, remarking in an interview with The Village Voice that: “We as Americans, having little or no culture, we figure that if you can build on two feet by four feet, you should have a building there, and screw anything that came before it.”

Tell me about it: longtime Lincoln Square merchant Lincoln Stationers shuttered in January 2006, after thirty years of supplying the neighborhood with fine pens, stationery, photo albums, leather journals, gift wrap and greeting cards. I suppose this type of business is a dying breed… but did they have to replace it this month with another Upper West Side Starbucks? Apparently yes, because “people won’t cross the street to get coffee.”

The Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market launched the first weekend of August 2005, in the still sketchy shadow of the Port Authority, at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. In warmer weather, the Annex features up to 170 vendors, and a $1 shuttle service runs between here and the other flea markets in Chelsea every Saturday and Sunday from 10 am to 6 pm; in the grey chill of late January, the number of stands is far lower, and the surroundings more desolate.

Welcome to SoHell.

There's 1 comment so far ... Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market

Qsoz
February 9, 2007

Which reminds me, we should go back to Daisy Mae’s for some BBQ.

Go for it ...