http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/ny...er=rss&emc=rss
Flea Market Considers Its Fate in a Casino World
By FERNANDA SANTOS and MIRELA IVERAC
August 29, 2010
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To the uncertainties over the arrival of casino gambling in a working-class neighborhood in Queens, add this: What will become of the sprawling flea market that has made its home at Aqueduct racetrack for more than 30 years? Will the vision of a lavish new Aqueduct, filled with thousands of slot machines and high-end restaurants, accommodate a down-market collection of stalls in a parking lot?
Stroll the market’s crowded aisles or walk along nearby Liberty Avenue, nerve center of the small business district in the Ozone Park neighborhood, and you are bound to hear those questions.
Shopkeepers describe the market as one piece of an engine that has kept on fueling the surrounding business district even in tough economic times. Its stalls are extensions of some of the stores there, and also of small factories, bakeries, wholesale and home-based businesses in neighborhoods all around.
Shoppers come from near and far. Stacy Lee, 35, a police officer in Kingston, Jamaica, travels to the flea market at least once a year and returns home stocked with goods, like the dresses, skirts, moisturizers and kitchen utensils she had stuffed in a green suitcase one recent Saturday.
“I wouldn’t be buying and lugging them back if they weren’t cheap,” Ms. Lee said.
The flea market was not a factor in the decision to award a contract to develop a casino at Aqueduct, so its future is up in the air. But neighborhood leaders and vendors suspect the market may be seen as insignificant given the magnitude of the project.
At a time when the state is in desperate need of cash, the developer, Genting New York, would provide the state with a $380 million licensing fee up front. Genting, a subsidiary of the largest gambling company in Malaysia and Britain, said the casino — which has 4,525 video slot machines and is linked to restaurants and a nearby subway station by a climate-controlled bridge — could generate $1.5 million or more a day in tax revenue.
“We’re just collateral damage,” said Yvonne Kissoon, 52, a Guyanese immigrant who has sold lingerie from a stall at the market since 1987. Eight years later, Ms. Kissoon said, she and her husband, Reggie, had saved enough to open a store on Liberty Avenue, near 108th Street, four blocks from the market’s main entrance on Rockaway Boulevard.
The flea market fills the racetrack’s north parking lot. It is open on Tuesdays and weekends and has at least 500 stalls offering clothes, perfumes and accessories; slushies, spices and chicken shish kebobs; statues of the Hindu god Ganesh and lucky money trees that, according to practitioners of feng shui, are conducive to prosperity.
A collection of flags — Guyanese, Colombian, Jamaican, Brazilian, Italian, American — flutter above the stands, revealing the nationalities of the vendors. To them, the market is a first step on their climb up the economic ladder, or their sole support.
Steven Baum, 55, who lives on Long Island, has sold formal dresses and suits at the market for 25 years, as well as at a flea market in Columbus, N.J. Samer Zaben, 24, a civil engineering student from Howard Beach, Queens, works at the market on weekends, helping his parents sell men’s clothing from two stands.
People travel by car, subway or bus, with some buses coming from as far away as Baltimore and Philadelphia. David King, 57, a biomedical engineer, traveled from Boston one recent Saturday on a trip organized by the Methodist church he attends.
“You get your bargains, and that’s why you come here,” Mr. King said.
Wilfer Asprilla, 39, an immigrant from Colombia who lives in Maspeth, Queens, said he made a living from the food he had sold at the market for 15 years, and up to 500 people might stop by on a Saturday or Sunday to savor his mozzarepa — mozzarella cheese on sweet ground corn cakes — and other specialties.
A manager at the flea market, Tom Walker, drove past Mr. Asprilla’s stand in a golf cart and said that rumblings of the market’s closing were “rumor at this point.” Mr. Asprilla seemed resigned to it, though, saying, “It’s going to happen sooner or later.”
It has happened at least once, years ago, before a previous attempt to build a casino at Aqueduct failed. (The effort to place a casino at the racetrack has been almost 10 years in the making.) “We got to the market one day and they gave us a slip at the gate saying it would be the last day,” Ms. Kissoon, the lingerie seller, recalled.
The market wound up closing on weekends for a few months. “We have no idea what will happen this time,” she said.
Messages left at the Westbury, N.Y., offices of Plain N Fancy Shows, which operates the market, have not been returned. The New York Racing Authority, which runs Aqueduct, said the arrangement with the market was private and could not be discussed.
In a statement, Stefan Friedman, a spokesman for Genting New York, said the company had not yet “focused on the property outside of the proposed casino” but it was open to exploring “all possible uses of the site.”
The Indo-Caribbean Alliance, a community organization based in Ozone Park, is working to organize the vendors and find other places in the area that could house the market. But Betty Braton, chairwoman of Community Board 10, which represents the area, said, “There aren’t too many pieces of property that can accommodate something of this size.”
In the meantime, the vendors press on, trying to figure out how much merchandise to order, a difficult calculation when they do not know if the market will be around much longer.
“I don’t know how you can have 10-, 20-year tenants and not have the decency of telling them what’s going to happen,” Ms. Kissoon said. “To them, it might be just a decision. But it’s our livelihood you’re talking about here.”
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