Fantastic Indoor Swap Meet

The sign at 1717 South Decatur Boulevard, on the corner of Oakey, spells the name Fantastik, with a k. Behind it the Fantastic Indoor Swap Meet opens Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is a dollar at the door. Seniors pay fifty cents, and children 12 and under and military go in free. Clark County School District teachers and support staff are admitted free on Sundays with a school ID. The building stands on a 15.5-acre lot about ten minutes’ drive from the Las Vegas Strip, and most of that lot is parking.

Inside, the rows are lettered and the booths numbered, from A-01 to PG-06, and the operator publishes a directory and a row map. In 2026 the operator counted more than 225 small businesses on the premises. A December 2025 release put them in 525 booths. The goods are new merchandise, and the directory runs from aerosol accessories and alterations through cellular repair, embroidery, exotic plants, insurance and tax service, knives and swords, silk flowers, sunglasses, trading cards and remote-control cars to wigs. Cancerchic Tarot keeps a booth, as do a psychic advisor, a photo booth, a thermal-massage stall called Yoju’s, and two Century 21 real-estate desks. A booth called The Snake Man is listed under pets.

Food is sold along the aisles. Mai’s Deli Sandwich Shop is at B-05, and some of its customers have given the owner their own artwork of her and her food. The directory also lists KD Hotdogs, a gourmet coffee shop, Fluff Cotton Candy, Rickey’s Cane Juice, Tambayan BBQ, Tu Michoacana Las Vegas, and Sun’s Beef Jerky Thai Style at J-01, which the operator lists as a 19-year tenant. On open days a rotating line of food trucks parks in the east lot as the Food Truck Village. By the operator’s account, a maintenance crew readies all 15 acres each weekend. The crew puts up walls, shampoos carpets and decorates for the holidays.

The weekly calendar and the parking lot

Certain events repeat every week. On Friday mornings at 10 a walking group called Get Fit at Fantastic! meets in front of the main doors and loops the aisles, and its members are free to shop afterward. On Sundays from noon to 4 the KSHP Shopping Show broadcasts from the meet. It is a radio bargain program, and the swap meet’s calendar says its format was pioneered in 1981. On the third weekend of each month, antique and vintage dealers fill the southeast corner of the building for the Fantastic Vintage Market, which the operator bills as Las Vegas’s only indoor monthly market of its kind. The October 2026 market is set for the 16th through the 18th. Some Saturdays the Vegas Kids Zone Mighty Mogul Market fills booths inside the building with sellers aged 5 to 17.

The parking lot holds its own events. The October 2026 calendar lists Calling All the Monsters, a Halloween market with food trucks and free entry, from 1 to 6 p.m. on the 17th, and an Alter Tokens Halloween Market on the 31st. Parent City Wide has handed out food in the lot, with a giveaway that begins at 9 a.m. and runs until the food is gone. Vegas Events and More holds a market there called Shop the Lot. A night market called Killah Kine, founded by Terann Enriques, first set up outside the swap meet in April 2025. At that market Ashley Kaawa and her husband, Justin, have sold Hawaiian-inspired mochi under the name Kaawa Kreations.

The outdoor markets began in 2024. That September, owner Doug Kays told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “The indoor area is full, it’s been full.” The paper counted 220 vendors in 505 booths and 20 vacant spots. It reported that the building covered only 3 of the property’s 15.5 acres, and that of more than 1,200 parking spaces only about 680 were needed to satisfy code. Until then, each outdoor event had needed a special permit from the Las Vegas City Council. The plan laid out three plots in the lot, of 34,000, 30,000 and 18,000 square feet. The first event was set for September 28, 2024, run by 702 Market, which had previously been held at Arizona Charlie’s Casino. The paper called it the swap meet’s first expansion in 34 years. Kays described the day sellers who would use the plots this way: “I refer to them as ‘incubator retailers.’ Going outside with day events allows them to get their feet wet and get their business started.”

Sources give the building’s size differently. The operator’s booth-rental page describes an enclosed building of 135,000 square feet with more than 600 booths and more than 1,000 free parking spaces. The 2024 Review-Journal article put the indoor swap meet at 90,000 square feet.

The Bird Man and the Snake Man

In December 2018 the Review-Journal walked the aisles and wrote down the vendors’ nicknames: the Bird Man, the Doughnut Guy, the Wig Lady, the Snake Man. Farid Failey, the Doughnut Guy, sold miniature doughnuts to shoppers.

Marco Ferreira, the Bird Man, kept 60 birds for sale in a corner booth. In that booth canaries sang, cockatiels whistled, and parrots talked and sometimes squawked. Ferreira was a 48-year-old Los Angeles native who had gotten his first bird at the age of 12. He petted the belly of a baby white cockatiel as he would a kitten, removed a few ingrown feathers, and kissed it on the beak. “Birds are very affectionate,” he said. “They’re big lovers.” A customer who gave her name only as Adele said, “He knows birds, the best seeds to feed them, everything. I used to go to Petco, but no more.”

Levon Holiday, the Snake Man, came from Louisiana. His booth held a ball python, a corn snake, a red-tailed boa constrictor, and an albino boa in a terrarium of its own. For years he had charged $30 to photograph customers wearing his snakes like jewelry, a turban or a scarf. Some customers wanted the snakes themselves, so he began selling them, and in the year before the article he counted three dozen new snake owners. To draw shoppers in, he set the red-tailed boa on a wooden sawhorse. When a visitor touched the wood, the snake shifted its grip. “He felt that,” Holiday said. “Did you see him move?” Kathy and Calvin Nashiro, on vacation from Hawaii, stopped at the booth with their 3-year-old son, Carson, who wanted to touch a lizard. Before the family left, Carson had two snakes draped around his neck, one of them the albino boa. “The snake guy was so gentle,” his mother said.

The paper also told what happened to Holiday’s van about six months before the article. He came back to the Fantastic parking lot to find the van gone, with three snakes inside it in boxes. He soon found it abandoned at a nearby Taco Bell. The van was out of gas, but the snakes may also have played a part. “He may have looked in the back,” Holiday said, “and told himself, ‘I’m done with this.’”

The same article met several other vendors. Michelle Hung, 28 years at Fantastic by then, sold suitcases, bamboo plants, amethyst and statues, and helped visitors find what would “make their house have a good energy.” Marietta Shahadlaus, who held a fine-arts degree from the Philippines, made floral arrangements across nine booths. Marlene Davis had trained as a nurse in Mexico and again at CSN, and on weekends she gave thermal massage at Yoju. “I’m not here to get rich, I want to help people,” she said. Adella Torchy and her husband had owned a jewelry store in San Francisco and had retired to Las Vegas. She came back to work three days a week to earn money for bingo and bowling, and she said the job meant she “stays away from the casino three days a week.” Alfonso Vernal had grown his AR Furniture from Fantastic into three stores. He lost everything in the 2008 crash and moved back into a space at the swap meet.

The Wig Lady and Cowboy Jim

Susan Schneider, the Wig Lady, is a former hairdresser who runs Vegas Girl Wigs. A 2017 article dates her arrival to 1990 and the 2018 article to 1992, and both agree she began with two booths. She later closed her store in the east valley and moved everything to the swap meet. By 2017 she stocked nearly 1,800 hairpieces in 10 booths, and by the 2018 count she had a dozen. The 2018 reporter noted that couples often shopped her racks together, and that the wig was usually for the husband.

In 2017 Brenda O’Hara, an English expatriate, owned Regency Jewelers. She had bought the business about 20 years earlier as “something to do” in retirement. Her advice to new vendors was plain: “It’s a market. If you want to be something that looks like it should be in the Fashion Show Mall, then go to the Fashion Show Mall.”

That same year, Jim Klingensmith, 72, ran Cowboy Jim’s Cookies & Candies from a 10-by-10 booth with a glass case, a small fryer and a doughnut dropper. He opened it with his wife, Debbie, after the two sold a food truck they had brought from Florida. Klingensmith had served three Marine Corps tours in Vietnam. After he came home to Oklahoma, a cook at his mother’s diner taught him to make yeast dough. That cook had been a chef aboard a Navy aircraft carrier. Some of Klingensmith’s recipes came from his German great- and great-great-grandmothers. Among them was potato candy, a fudge-like confection of potatoes, sugar and peanut butter. “Whether people realize it or not, baking is an exact science,” he said. “It’s not like cooking, where you take a dash of this or go ‘Bam,’ you know.” A customer, Gina Fair, named the funnel cakes with cinnamon sugar as her favorite.

From Vegas Village to Fantastik Furniture

The building is older than the swap meet. In December 2024 the owners opened a gallery inside it called “1717: The History of Fantastic Retail,” which traces the building from its construction in the 1960s. The gallery features Ralph Harman (1906–1973). By the gallery’s account, the end of World War II brought Harman to Las Vegas, where he brought the Vegas Village franchise to life. The gallery displays photographs of Vegas Village and objects the store used, including a vintage shopping cart, and a custom-made neon sign. The Vegas Chamber held a ribbon cutting for the gallery on December 13, 2024. The gallery’s history wall also records the building’s ownership by Continental Connectors and by Margaret Elardi. In 1982 the building changed hands again and became Fantastik Furniture.

In 1991 four businessmen leased the building: Hal Present, Art Lamensdorf, Donald Weeks and Douglas Kays. They bought it in 1995. The operator’s history says the swap meet has been here since then, and that the Kays, Lamensdorf and Present families still own and run it.

Accounts of the founding differ. In 2017 the Review-Journal dated the opening to 1988 and called Kays the founder. In the 2018 article Kays said the venture spent three years at another location before moving here in 1991. When it moved, he said, the swap meet kept the furniture store’s Fantastik sign.

According to Kays, the swap meet had housed more than 4,500 businesses and drawn more than 15 million shoppers by 2017. By late 2024 the operator gave a count of more than 8,000 start-ups. Kays told the 2017 reporter that the Friday-to-Sunday schedule followed the pattern of flea markets around the country. He and his partners had considered opening longer but decided the change would be too difficult after so many years. In his words, success came down to “good product, good pricing, good display and interaction with the customer.”

Every year Kays and his fellow owners, Sam Present and J.R. Lamensdorf, hold an anniversary dinner for vendors who have stayed ten years or longer. Each of those vendors receives a plaque marking the count. On the operator’s list of long tenants, Hung’s Silk Flowers and Vegas Girl Wigs stand at 34 years.