Shopping for Treasures on the UWS at the 104th Street Yard Sale

By Claire Davenport

Saturday’s West 104th Street Yard Sale, an annual event hosted by the West 104th Street Block Association, lasted seven hours and included more than 60 stalls selling everything from vintage aprons and Betty Boop figurines, to used trumpets and clarinets, to homemade pottery mugs and bowls.

Hundreds of shoppers wandered the block of West 104th Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, rifling through stacks of clothing and inspecting matchboxes with covers featuring Hello Kitty or paintings of Frida Kahlo. Many items at the sale cost less than $10.

Tables set up for community organizations like “It’s Easy Being Green,” a local education and action group focused on climate change, were peppered between the stalls. New York City Councilmembers Shaun Abreu and Gale Brewer made appearances at what has grown to be a major neighborhood event. The first 104th Street yard sale was held 35 years ago, and except for one year during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s been staged annually ever since.

Shopper Allen Zhang held up a huge, framed film poster he’d found, advertising the Martin Scorsese classic “The Departed,” a treasure for which he paid five dollars. “I like films, and I just moved into a new apartment and was looking to decorate,” Zhang said.

A little up the road, Sarah Galena was with her two kids, hunting for items she could cobble together to create a Halloween costume for her younger son, Caleb, who planned to go as a rockhopper penguin. At one table, Galena picked up a hat she thought might work, but Caleb, accompanying her, shook his head ‘no.’

“We know a bunch of people who have tables here,” Galena said, as Caleb ran off to inspect a Funko Pop collectible item. “We live right here.” Behind her shoulder, silver high-heeled shoes stacked on top of boxes of binder clips glinted in the sunshine next to a vintage Easy-Bake toy oven for kids (the earliest Easy-Bakes date back to the 1960s).

Emma Zurer, who heard about the event on Facebook and came with friend Daisy Larom to shop, said: “We came looking for treasures.” Zurer runs an archiving and digitizing service for people in the New York City area; she also hoped to network with potential customers at the yard sale.

Larom, who used to run a consignment booth so is no stranger to finding used treasures, showed off a vintage framed Yaesu Ham world map she’d just bought. A collector’s item for ham radio enthusiasts, the map displays prefixes and DXCC names for hobbyists who use the system. “Ham” is another term for amateur radio, and DXCC names are used by ham operators to know what country another operator is in.

“This is people’s actual stuff. There’s a history behind the objects,” Zurer said as she surveyed card tables brimming with books and old records. “This sort of event doesn’t happen as much anymore. It’s kind of dying out.”

Ner Beck, one of the vendors at the yard sale, described himself as “a registered packrat.” He pointed to a stack of Bennington plates, stoneware made in Vermont, that he said he found in a box in the garbage.

“Whatever other people reject, I love to collect,” said Beck, who makes most of his finds “on the street.” Jewelry is one of his biggest sellers, he said, as he showed costume jewelry pieces that came from his mother’s old hat boxes.

Beck is a retired graphic designer. His wife Bobbi is an artist who also had her work on display at the yard sale; both of the Becks have shown their works, including hundreds of photo collages, in New York Public Library locations around Manhattan. Beck, who’s lived on West End Ave with Bobbi for over 50 years, said, “I remember little toddlers running around, and now I say, ‘Who is that tall guy? Oh my gosh, it’s little Mark!’”

Steve Zirinsky, the new president of the West 104th Street Block Association, summed up the event as “recycling at its best,” as he unrolled skeins of tickets for the yard sale’s raffle.

The association started in 1970, with a mission to promote the safety, general welfare, and quality of life for the immediate 104th Street area. Meetings are every second Tuesday of the month to advocate for community needs, from rat management to street beautification.

The raffle at last year’s yard sale yielded over $5,000, despite heavy rain on the sale day. This year, with sunny skies, the group hoped to clear more than that from raffle ticket sales. During the event, there was also a silent auction, live music, a book fair, and a bake sale.

By the end of the day, Ner and Bobbi Beck had sold almost everything at their tables. “Our apartment is cluttered with this stuff for a year until the yard sale,” laughed Ner Beck, “So now we can fill it up again.”

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