NORTH SYDNEY, N.S. — You could say last weekend’s planned flea market re-opening at the Northside Mall was a transformative experience.
In fact, it was so transforming it ended up cancelling the entire market, which will resume on Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
"What happened is the people who own the mall closed it because a transformer in the back went and we had no lights,” says market owner George Peters. “We never got started. We had everybody there and we were opening at 10 and then at 9:30 we had to close it.
“But these things happen — you never know.”
Peters is confident the market will go ahead this weekend at the Northside Mall as scheduled.
“We’re pleased to be there,” he told The Cape Breton Post earlier this week. “It’s our intention to be back there next week. We just have to get together with the owners again and restart the process but most of the people who were there left their goods onsite and we locked it up and they’re coming back this week. So we’re looking forward to it — it was just a setback that we didn’t expect.”
Peters says the new market is located in the former dollar store and will house 140 vendors. If there’s a good response, they may rent additional space at the mall and open another room for the lengthy list of vendors waiting.
“When we were in the Schwartz store, at this time of the year we’d get around 232 vendors,” said Peters. “Right now we’re working off a waiting list for vendors. We’re not complaining — we’re happy to get the space that we got but if we get more space, we would fill it. What we want to do is to see how it’s received as far as Bras d’Or, Baddeck and Florence and the rest of the area. When we were in Sydney, we’d received around a thousand people a day … I don’t know what to expect over here but before we try to expand we would like to see how we do first.”
It’s been five weeks since there’s been a regular flea market. Peters was apologetic about not being able to get cancellation notices out for last Sunday’s event but he expects no problems with holding this week’s market and says everyone is looking forward to it.
“We’re looking forward to it. I think we’ll do pretty good over there.”
RELATED:
Sydney flea market could close after 40 years
