An indoor swap meet in the United States, especially Southern California and Nevada, is a type of

bazaar A bazaar or souk is a marketplace consisting of multiple small Market stall, stalls or shops, especially in the Middle East, the Balkans, Central Asia, North Africa and South Asia. They are traditionally located in vaulted or covered streets th ...

, a permanent, indoor shopping center open during normal retail hours, with fixed booths or storefronts for the vendors. Indoor swap meets house vendors that sell a wide variety of goods and services, especially clothing and electronics. For example, vendors in the Fantastic Indoor Swap Meet in

Las Vegas Las Vegas, colloquially referred to as Vegas, is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Nevada and the county seat of Clark County. The Las Vegas Valley metropolitan area is the largest within the greater Mojave Desert, and second-l ...

sell

clothing, furniture, handbags and toys,…but there’s a ton more: flowers and plants, pet supplies, leather goods, sporting equipment, perfume and cosmetics, luggage and electronics, to name just a few. There also are booths for services, including window tinting, palm reading, alterations, engraving and estate planning. The majority of items sold here are new, although antique alley does feature some vintage and second-hand goods.

It is different in format to an outdoor swap meet, the equivalent of a

flea market A flea market (or swap meet) is a type of street market that provides space for vendors to sell previously owned (secondhand) goods. This type of market is often seasonal. However, in recent years there has been the development of 'formal' ...

, generally open on a limited number of days and often without fixed locations for its vendors. Indoor swap meets are present in many working-class communities across Southern California, with a concentration in Central Los Angeles. Indoor swap meets include the Valley Indoor Swap Meet in Panorama City and Pomona (owned by the Maceric Co.) ,

Anaheim Anaheim ( ) is a city in northern Orange County, California, United States, part of the Greater Los Angeles area. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 346,824, making it the most populous city in Orange County, the tenth-most ...

Marketplace, Fantastic Indoor Swap Meet in Las Vegas, and the High Desert Indoor Swap Meet in

Victorville Victorville is a city in Victor Valley in San Bernardino County, California. Its population as of the 2020 census was 134,810. Victorville is the principal city of a Victor Valley–based urban area defined by the United States Census Bureau: ...

. Longstanding indoor swap meets that are now defunct include the Pico Rivera Indoor Swap Meet and San Ysidro Indoor Swap Meet.

History

Swap meets in the U.S. long consisted of U.S.-born vendors who sold mostly secondhand goods in outdoor spaces. In the 1970s, Latino immigrants started selling cultural goods and affordable services at swap meets in Southern California and some swap meets started resembling the

tianguis A is an open-air market or bazaar that is traditionally held on certain market days in a town or city neighborhood in Mexico and Central America. This bazaar tradition has its roots well into the pre-Hispanic period and continues in many cases ...

, open-air markets, of Mexico. At the same time, drive-in movie theaters were becoming less popular, and their owners eagerly rented them out during the day to outdoor swap meets, which proliferated. Then, mostly Korean immigrants used their connections in the growing import/export trade with Asia to establish their own swap meet stalls and stock them with new, cheap goods from Asia instead of secondhand goods. In the 1980s and 1990s as properties in

South Los Angeles South Los Angeles, also known as South Central Los Angeles or simply South Central, is a region in southwestern Los Angeles County, California, lying mostly within the city limits of Los Angeles, south of Downtown Los Angeles, downtown. It is de ...

and parts of Central L.A. became abandoned, Korean immigrants bought them and turned them into indoor swap meets.

Connection with gangsta rap

A former

Sears Sears, Roebuck and Co., commonly known as Sears ( ), is an American chain of department stores and online retailer founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosen ...

store in Compton turned into the Compton Fashion Fair indoor swap meet. Music stall operator Wan Joon Kim helped launch the career of various local

gangsta rap Gangsta rap or gangster rap, initially called reality rap, is a subgenre of rap music that conveys the culture, values, and experiences of urban gangs and street hustlers, frequently discussing unpleasant realities of the world in general th ...

artists, as did Steve Yano at the Roadium on Redondo Beach Boulevard in Torrance.

Articles about indoor swap meets

California

* Indio Grand Marketplace,

Indio Indio may refer to: Places * Indio, Bovey Tracey, an historic estate in Devon, England * Indio, California, a city in Riverside County, California, United States People with the name * Indio (musician), Canadian musician Gordon Peterson * Índi ...

Plaza México A town square (or public square, urban square, city square or simply square), also called a plaza or piazza, is an open public space commonly found in the heart of a traditional town or city, and which is used for community gatherings. Rela ...

, Lynwood * Valley Indoor Swap Meet,

Panorama City, Los Angeles Panorama City is a neighborhood in the city of Los Angeles, California, in the San Fernando Valley. It has a generally young age range as well as the highest population density in the Valley. More than half of the neighborhood's population was b ...

References

External links

Frank Shyong, "Column: As an uncertain future looms, Los Angeles’ swap meet vendors live in the moment"
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Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...

'', July 20, 2020 {{Retail