"I started this flea market many years ago to meet women." Michael Sussman has been telling reporters some version of that line since at least 2005, usually while walking a visitor past a folding table of Depression glass or a rack of ball gowns nobody has worn since a debutante party decades ago. It's a good line. It also buries the more interesting fact underneath it: the joke he tells about starting a flea market has held up longer than almost every business that has opened, closed, and reopened around it.
Sussman was a recent Georgetown Law graduate waiting on his bar exam results when he set up shop in the Hardy Middle School parking lot at 1819 35th Street NW, across Wisconsin Avenue from the Safeway. Sources differ on whether that was 1972, 1973, or 1974, which is itself worth sitting with for a second. A business old enough that its own chroniclers can't agree on the year it started is not a pop-up. It's infrastructure.
Older Than Almost Everything Around It
Georgetown's retail turns over fast. The Washingtonian's most recent fall roundup lists a new cooking school, Skillette, opening this season in the same building as Bizzeria, and JINYA Ramen Bar has announced a new Georgetown location with a late-night menu as one of two openings planned for the brand this year. That's normal here. A storefront on Wisconsin Avenue or M Street can change hands, change concepts, and change again before most leases run their course.
The flea market has been parking in the same school lot, on the same day, at the same hours, since sometime in the early 1970s. It closed for a couple of months during the pandemic and reopened. Everything else about it, according to the Georgetowner's own reporting on its fiftieth year, has stayed close to the same: Sunday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., rain or shine, year-round.
That continuity matters for anyone trying to understand what daily life in this neighborhood actually looks like, as opposed to what a restaurant guide says about it. Georgetown has no Metro station of its own, so getting to the market without a car means the D80 or D82 bus along Wisconsin Avenue, or the C85 and D96 lines that stop closer to 35th Street. Street parking near Hardy fills early. None of that has changed in years either, which is either an inconvenience or a filter, depending on how you feel about crowds.
Fifty-Some Years, Give or Take
Sussman still shows up around 5:30 or 6 in the morning to watch vendors unload, according to his own account in the Georgetowner's coverage of the market's fiftieth anniversary. He has done this, by his telling, even the morning after his own wedding. A 2017 city appraisal of the site, cited in the Georgetown Voice's reporting, described the market's purpose in blunt terms: it exists to benefit the small vendors who rent the tents, not to generate profit for the person who runs it. Regular vendors pay somewhere between thirty and sixty dollars a week for a spot, and the ones who show up consistently enough get to hold that spot permanently, week after week, for as long as they want it.
That arrangement produces a specific kind of business that doesn't really exist elsewhere in this zip code. Chris and Brian Cloud sell Depression-era glass, china, silver, and crystal out of the same spot most Sundays. Brian has worked flea markets since 2004, but the two of them sell exclusively in Georgetown now because, as Chris put it to the Georgetown Voice, it's the longest-running, most consistently operating market either of them has found. Lee Smith spent forty years building a vintage watch and jewelry business under the name LRS, first out of a Georgetown storefront and, for the past fifteen years, out of a folding table at the market instead, with his wife Elke working the booth beside him. He told the paper he keeps coming because it's fun, and because, in his words, "this is fun, as long as you ain't got to eat" off it alone anymore.
The market has adjusted where it needed to. It used to include a section of farm-fresh produce, discontinued once enough grocery stores opened nearby that the fresh food didn't fill a gap anymore. That's a small detail, but it's evidence against the idea that this place is frozen in amber. It changes exactly as much as it needs to and no more.
What the Younger Vendors Are Changing
The generational shift shows up most clearly in how money changes hands. Cash has always been the baseline here, and every vendor still takes it. But Venmo and CashApp have crept in over the past several years, driven largely by newer sellers. Vicky Khamphoui, who sells vintage clothing under the handle @vkhoney.vintage, works several markets around the DMV but says she's at Georgetown most often, in part because a flea market table doesn't take a twenty percent cut the way reselling apps like Depop do. Sophie Bernstein sold clothes online for seven years before she ever set up a table in person, something she only started doing within the past year, and she's noticed there isn't much competition for women's clothing among the market's current sellers. A longtime customer named Samantha Liu, who has been coming since she was a kid, describes the current mix as old-fashioned, in-person shopping running alongside a younger crowd and app-based payments, and says watching that blend play out is part of what keeps her coming back.
None of that changes the core mechanics Sussman set up decades ago. It just means the people running the tables have adapted the tools without touching the arrangement underneath them.
The Georgetown Names You Might Not Expect
Some of the market's history reads like local trivia that happens to be true. Larry McMurtry set part of his 1982 novel "Cadillac Jack" at the market. Sussman has told the Washington Post that Diane Keaton, whom he calls the "Queen of the Swap Meets," used to shop there regularly with McMurtry, mostly for vintage clothing. One vendor once priced a painting around a hundred dollars, assuming, along with everyone who walked past it, that it was a copy. When it didn't sell, the dealer took it to a gallery, where it was authenticated and eventually sold for ten thousand dollars.
A longtime dealer and site manager named Butch Finch has described customers arriving with flashlights before dawn to beat the crowd to the best tables, and a regular named Mitchell Stangey has been showing up before 8 a.m., sometimes before 6, for decades, on the theory that the earlier you get there, the better your odds. The crowd itself, per the Post's own description from 2005, mixes dog-walking neighbors, young professionals, designers scouting for pieces, and the occasional member of Congress, all working the same folding tables. Georgetown University freshmen get told to check it out during their first week on campus, which means the market functions as a kind of informal orientation ritual passed down student to student, alongside whatever their RA tells them about the dining hall.
Worth the Early Alarm
None of this makes the market a must-do tourist stop, and treating it that way would miss the point. It's closer to a piece of neighborhood plumbing that happens to be older than the buildings people assume are the permanent fixtures around it. The restaurants on Wisconsin Avenue will keep changing hands. The flea market will keep opening at 8, closing at 4, and running through whatever weather Sunday brings, the same way it has for more than fifty years.
If you've lived here a while and never made it out on a Sunday, the version of Georgetown you'd find in that parking lot predates most of the neighborhood you already know.
For those of you thinking about your next move in Georgetown, whether that's buying your first place here or finally selling the one you've outgrown, Hugh McDermott brings the same kind of long memory to the market that Sussman brings to his lot. Let's connect.
