By Sarah Ryley
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
FORT GREENE — Nostalgic for the sprawling flea markets of Chelsea past, Jonathan Butler decided last year to start one in Brooklyn. But don’t expect this flea market to carry white tube socks, so often a staple of city street fairs these days.
“It’s going to be antique, vintage, and one-of-a-kind type-stuff,” everything from furniture to vinyl to jewelry, said Butler, also founder of the real estate blog Brownstoner. Food stands could line the bleachers, where patrons would take a break before heading back to the maze of 200 to 300 vendors he expects to cram the yard of Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, on Lafayette and Clermont avenues.
Butler said the market would start in April and run every Sunday, at least until Christmas. “If it’s a booming success, the vendors will be happy to freeze their butts off every Sunday through the winter,” he said. “We’ll just have to wait and see.” Since it was announced early this month, Butler said 80 vendors have expressed interest in participating.
Councilwoman Letitia James helped him secure the location. “All I did was help him with the bureaucracy in confirming the location,” she said. “I wanted something centrally located in my district that would serve the needs of Clinton Hill and Fort Greene.”
The schoolyard is within walking distance from the burgeoning retail and restaurant strips of DeKalb Avenue and Fulton Street. “It would help the businesses in the neighborhood, obviously, and it would just continue to highlight the prosperity in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill,” said James.
James, like Butler, said she expects the flea market to attract citywide interest. “If they come over the bridge, they’re more than welcome,” she said. “Just don’t litter.”
Naturally, as the founder of one of the most interactive blogs in the city, Butler wants his flea market to utilize online technology. He said he wants to create a Web site where he, the customers and the vendors could interact with each other. “Let the five big furniture vendors know you’re looking for a Danish modern coffee table and perhaps when they’re going through their warehouses, choosing what to bring, they could pick a couple.”
Vendors would pay between 75 cents and $2 per square foot, depending on the size of their plot, according to prices posted on BrooklynFlea.com. Butler said a portion of the money would be used to pay for expenses such as rent, security, insurance, maintenance and a new hire to coordinate the market.
After taking into account the aisles, roughly half of the 40,000-square-foot schoolyard could be rented.
Though a private school, mainly attended by Black and Latino students, Butler said Bishop Loughlin doesn’t have enough money to repair its track. “Hopefully this is a nice revenue boost for them,” he said. “And I think they’re hoping it helps raise the school’s profile a bit because they’re having trouble attracting students.”
Butler said his blog — which has posts on everything from that store opening on Smith Street to price cuts in Bedford-Stuyvesant to homemade renovation videos — is an easy branding platform for the flea market, and with one million hits last month, its best marketing tool.
Other opportunities for expanding on Brownstoner’s “branding platform” could present themselves in the future, but for now Butler, 37, said he’s busying himself with securing tenants, insurance and legal issues, and making new hires. “There’s no master plan for world domination, this is just something that I’ve always been interested in that I thought there was a need for.”
Indeed, operating both the blog and a flea market seem to combine Butler’s past lives working in the media, real estate, furniture and financial sectors. Only this time, he said, “I could spend the next 20 years of my life doing this.”
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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