Flea market’s back in business

By Mary Grzebieniak

Some vendors lost thousands of dollars’ worth of products in last week’s fire.

YOUNGSTOWN — It was like any other Sunday at the flea market as the regular crowd streamed past booths full of peaches and kiwi, bedding plants and videotapes, penknives, bric-a-brac and Avon creams.

Except for the smell of ashes and the rubble cordoned off with yellow plastic tape, you might think it was a normal Sunday at the Four Seasons Flea and Farm Market on 3000 McCartney Road (U.S. Route 422).

An occasional shopper strolled over to regard the bent metal and concrete block that remained of the main building after Thursday’s spectacular fire. But word was already spreading that rebuilding is in the works.

Four Seasons Manager Carol Parslow said contractors are already being lined up and rebuilding will start as soon as the fire investigation is concluded and the site is cleaned up. She said a larger building or even multiple buildings are planned.

In the meantime, Parslow said, she was trying to find places for all the indoor vendors who were displaced by the fire, which was no easy task with phone lines down. She said that indoor vendors were being assigned spaces as they arrived Sunday morning.

While the flea market’s outdoor vendors pack up their products up and take them home at the end of the day, the indoor vendors pay more for their space and leave their products there from week to week. As a result, some vendors lost thousands of dollars’ worth of products. Some had nothing left to sell and others said Sunday they were selling items that they had advertised for sale on e-bay or brought from other flea markets because they had nothing else left.

Parslow said the losses were especially sad because vendors cannot buy insurance. A vendor herself before she became manager, Parslow said insurance companies will not insure the small businesses because their products are not secured in a locked area.

But she said that all but about 30 of the 180 inside vendors were there Sunday selling products. Some, she said, went together with other vendors or found space outside or in the pavilions. An unused building was also opened and made available for some of them.

One vendor not making any sales Sunday was Odessa Smith who said she decided to forgo her usual sale of home baked goods this week. She said her pies, cookies and cakes would have wilted outside in the 90-degree heat and that she wasn’t sure what kind of space would be available Sunday. But the grandmother who relies on four generations of her family to help with the business said she will probably be back next week. “All of us inside people are just like one big family,” she said.

Mary Penn of Hubbard said she and her husband worked early Thursday to hang lattice in the doomed building in order to display more of her products — then returned later when they heard the building was on fire. As they watched the building burn, “I could see the corner with my stuff,” she said.

She sells jewelry and Indian reproductions, some of which she makes herself. She lost about $3,500 worth of merchandise, including dream-catchers, hemp necklaces and bracelets, Indian wall hangings, tambourines and drums. She said she will just have to work harder to make up for her fire losses.

Don Sheffo of Boardman was selling fresh flowers Sunday as he has for the last 18 or so years since the flea market opened. Even though the flowers were wilting more quickly in the temporary building where he was assigned space, he said he plans to be there every week just as he’s always been. He said his customers, most of them elderly, depend on him as a source of inexpensive fresh flowers, which many buy to place on loved ones’ graves.

David Hudson of Youngstown’s South Side was selling his Avon products Sunday but said these were what he had brought from his booth at the Rogers auction. He lost all his goods, which he had in four different spots in the destroyed building. He has sold his products for 13 years at Four Seasons and said he is having a hard time dealing with the losses from the fire.

Patricia Micco of Boardman said she depends on her earnings from selling jewelry and other goods to pay her bills. She said she will have to figure out how to cope with the loss of five cases of rings and 300 ankle bracelets as well as the velvet cloth that she uses for display and the chair she sits in. Sunday she was selling the products that she carries in a case to and from her booth and is hopeful that new accommodations will soon be built for vendors.

Bob Williams of Greenville, Pa., said he lost $18,000 worth of tools, tarps, fiber optics and touch lamps. He and his wife, Margaret, have been vendors for 15 years. He said he will “just swallow” the loss and said he looks forward to construction of the new building.

Florence Rouse of Youngstown, who likes to browse the flea market in search of antiques and memorabilia as well as to get in some walking with her husband, said she is “so happy they are going to rebuild.”

She said she considers the flea market “a classroom without walls” full of old items that tell a story.