Punkottawa and Spectrasonic hosted a punk flea market in the Bronson Centre on Sept. 12, which hosted 41 vendors and small businesses.
According to Laura Smith, the owner of vendor Mavrick’s Emporium, one of the biggest strengths of the flea market as a whole was its diversity in what each vendor brought to sell.
“It’s good to have a variety of stuff as well—you don’t want to just have the same thing of 15 tables of guys selling shirts,” Smith said about the show. For example, vendor Capital Tease Burlesque was selling nipple pastilles and other pinup accessories.
“I like how many of the products here are not something that you can find in typical stores. It’s stuff that’s handmade usually, so they’re crafted by very independant individuals. It’s very interesting artistic stuff,” said Pola Gorodkova, a student at Lisgar Collegiate, who said she picked up quite a few different items from the show.
“I got zines . . . I got some clothing, two shirts, I got a shirt of a band that I saw at Ottawa Explosion, I got patches and pins,” Gorodkova said.
The market was full of people coming and going throughout the five-hour event and there was little to no lull in the attendance, despite rain throughout the day.
“There are so many punks in Ottawa and it’s great—everyone is selling something and they’re all so talented, so I think that them having a flea market is a very good, kind of expected thing,” Gorodkova said about the event and turnout.
However, according to Keith Donoghue, the owner of Hotbutteredpopcultured and one of the vendors during the market, who sold vintage sports caps and buttons from the USSR among other things, events like this aren’t getting all of the attention that they could be.
“There’s a lot of stuff that’s well established with a small amount of people, but there’s a lot of room for it to grow because there’s a lot of people that don’t know about it, so I find that really exciting,” Donoghue said about the local arts scene in Ottawa.
“In the context of the city and how long they’ve been around and how people know them, they’re a big part of the subculture . . . Spectrasonic works well within the local music industry, supports a lot of local bands,” Donoghue said.
