What’s Old is New: Vintage and Consignment Shops in the Neighborhood
Within the rapidly changing city, it’s refreshing to find spaces that nod to the eclectic, creative, and vibrant culture that our neighborhoods represent. This essence is captured in many local vintage and consignment shops. Through unique curatorial styles, fashion eras, and business ethos, these shops create a gorgeous patchwork that tells the story of our neighborhood’s cultural and artistic communities.
The shops highlighted below have all been featured as past Village Preservation Businesses of the Month. You can learn more about our Business of the Month program here!
Your input is needed! Tell us which independent store you love in Greenwich Village, the East Village, or NoHo: click here to nominate your favorite.
3rd & B’zaar – 191 East 3rd Street
3rd & B’zaar is the brainchild of Maegan Hayward and Alex Carpenters, the owners of our October 2018 Business of the Month, East Village Vintage Collective, which boasts affordable second-hand wear and miscellanea sprung from the marriage of Maegan’s shopping compulsion, her dreams of selling vintage apparel, and a chronically vacant storefront in the building where she lived. In November 2020, the store welcomed a sibling, 3rd & B’zaar, also born out of a crisis that Maegan treated as an opportunity.
When COVID-19 brought the city to a halt, Maegan, a tireless promoter of the local retail community, had the idea to rent a space with other sellers to create a collective holiday market. A wide variety of excited sellers joined in, forming a wonderland of quirky eclecticism, offering an assortment of craftwork, vintage wear, second-hand knick-knacks, and local artwork.
It was such a success that Maegan and Alex followed up the first pop-up with many more, and finally decided to open 3rd & B’zaar as a full-time pop-up market and event space.
Currently, 3rd & B’zaar operates on a 6-month cycle, during which eight vendors, including Maegan and Alex, operate and staff the market collectively. Everyone has the keys to the store and is free to make display and programming decisions in coordination with the others. The vendors cover a gamut of vintage merchandise, from Harley t–shirts and ‘90s colored leather jackets to costume jewelry and lingerie.
Jane’s Exchange, 191 E 3rd Street
Jane’s Exchange is a children’s consignment shop, the last of its kind in Manhattan. The shop is one of those classic East Village stores that bursts with personality and personalities. Colorful and whimsical, it invites you to lose yourself looking for treasures among its assorted merchandise.
In the store, you can find clothing for kids of all ages, from infants through teens; means to transport children, such as strollers, car seats, and even bicycles; and all kinds of ways to entertain young ones, including board games, wooden toys, action figures, and a great selection of books for all levels in several languages.
To talk only about the merchandise at Jane’s Exchange, however, is to lose sight of much of what makes the store unique. It is a place where both children and their parents come just to hang out. Kids gather in the reading area or around boxes of toys (kept there for that purpose) or in front of the TV, watching movies. Parents chat about movies or doodle on one the guitars kept by the owners at the store, or just shoot the breeze with the friendly proprietors.
Jane’s Exchange is the brainchild of Eva Dorsey, a longtime East Village resident who came up with the idea in 1993. She did so while pregnant with her daughter Jane, after considering the needs of local families with whom she dealt in the neighborhood. A children’s consignment store, she thought, would offer a budget-friendly way for parents to shop for their families and also afford her the flexibility and independence to care for Jane. She was shortly proven right. The store was a success with the local community, and over the course of several decades, became an integral part of the neighborhood.
But when her last partner retired in 2019, Eva decided that perhaps the time had come to shut the business down. The announcement was greeted with alarm by customers and neighbors, who know the important role that Jane’s Exchange played for local families. In the end, Eva made possible a transition to new owners, including her daughter Jane, who eventually took the helm for good. You can still, however, occasionally catch Eva at the store lending a hand.
Screaming Mimi’s – 240 West 14th Street
Screaming Mimi’s is more than a vintage and designer clothing store. Many consider it the ultimate purveyor of cool. Having changed locations a few times, the shop currently resides at 240 West 14th Street.
Screaming Mimi’s has it all. It was after a night dancing and partying at Studio 54 and commiserating with her coworker and later partner that Laura conceived of venturing into her own business. Working at the time at Abraham & Strauss in Brooklyn, Laura and her partner designed what would now be considered a pop-up shop, featuring men’s Vintage tweed jackets for women, men’s ties worn as belts, and other looks inspired by the Woody Allen movie. Laura admits the shop wasn’t a great success, but it felt rewarding.
Together they each came up with a $1,000 dollars, borrowed from their parents. Laura kept her job at Abraham and Strauss for years to fulfill the shop’s financial needs. Thankfully, this hard work payed off.
Fashion students come to collect and wear the funky garb, while costume and fashion designers shop for inspiration. In recent years, Screaming Mimi’s has served the burgeoning Burning Man crowd. Before going on their annual sojourn into the Nevada desert, many “Burners” start their pilgrimage here.
To stay in business takes a team, and although she lost her beloved partner in the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s and 90’s, Laura has been able to continually surround herself with creative people who share her vision. Her current staff share a passion for fashion and are all adept at creating stylish, creative, and unique outfits and costumes for their clientele.
East Village Vintage Collective – 545 East 12th Street
East Village Vintage Collective is a brick-and-mortar shop (and sister of 3rd & B’zaar) that boasts an outstanding collection of vintage clothes with an old-school East Village vibe.
Opened in 2015 by Maegan Hayward and Alex Carpenters, EVVC is like entering a time warp, which makes sense for a unique two-floor retail store in the bottom of a tenement built in 1878. To open a vintage store in the East Village was a lifelong dream of Maegan, a long-time vintage collector and frequenter of flea markets.
After leaving her job in film in 2015, Meagan decided to band together with a few other vintage sellers to open a pop-up store, which would soon become the permanent EVVC. The shop is truly a neighborhood spot, as it is below the apartment building where Meagan and Alex have lived since the shop opened.
EVVC is very civic-minded and locally engaged. They regularly host meetings and meet-ups, and as members of the East Village Independent Merchants’ Association, they helped organize “Tiki on Twelfth” to help draw attention to local businesses.
Maegan sees the solidarity of small shop owners as complementary and not competitive. She even created a local map of all the vintage stores in the East Village, lamenting that some are gone and thus the map needs to be updated.
To learn more about all of our businesses of the month, take a look at the full list available here!