Fremont Sunday Market

On Sunday mornings North 34th Street in Fremont is closed to cars, and by ten o’clock the pavement along the Fremont Canal is lined with tents for two blocks. The University of Washington’s student paper, The Daily, counted more than 200 vendor booths in 2025 and called it the largest market in King County. The tables carry trinkets, homemade crafts, upcycled clothing, vintage, antiques and collectibles. Food trucks park curbside, local DJs play, and buskers work the street. The market runs to four in the afternoon, rain or shine, every week of the year. Admission is free.

Brunch on 34th Street

The market calls its food row a curbside brunch, and no one takes reservations. In the fall of 2026 Whateke was selling a surf-and-turf burrito in a flour tortilla. CrunchKraft made arepas and burritos to order from ingredients it sources from Washington farms. Chef Moustafa and his family served West African fry bread with chicken at Moubak Fritta, and Tsukime Matcha Bar poured matcha iced or hot. Pop-ups come and go. On October 4, 2026, Crescent Croissant brought handmade egg tarts.

Beside the open street is the Hyper Market, an indoor room in a garage on 34th that the market keeps warm all year and fills with vintage finds and antiques. Outside it a vendor named Sophie sells Teal.Moonbeam spoon rings, made from antique silverware. Next door is Sundays Coffee, which Roselyn “Rosey” Reiter opened in the spring of 2025. It serves organic Caffè Vita beans and recommends a Banana Milk Iced Latte. The room is full of plants and lanterns, and its walls hold archival photographs of the market.

“We kind of made it seem like a living room; it’s a toned-down version of what my mother-in-law’s house looks like,” Rosey Reiter told The Daily. “All of the photos are of vendors past and present. There are vendors who have been here for 30 years on the walls.”

One of those photographs shows Terry Windham standing beside another vendor who dressed up as him for Halloween.

The Ring Lady and the Levi’s man

Terry Windham and his son Ian began vending at the market in 2002 at separate stalls, and they worked side by side until Terry died. Between their booths in the far back lot of the Hyper Market they kept a small CD player and a large collection of discs, clearly marked “not for sale.” Ian still sells vintage streetwear as Unlimited Breadstix Clothing, and he still plays music from whatever era his customers are shopping. By his own “conservative guess” he has sold more than 100,000 pairs of Levi’s.

“Say I got a T-shirt from some tiny town in Tennessee,” Windham said, “and somebody comes through and that’s where they’re from… the circle is complete. Those are my favorite kind of transactions, where I feel like it’s just home again.”

Sherri Morse sits behind a red tablecloth covered in boxes of silver jewelry at a booth called Finders Keepers. She has held the same spot since she arrived, and in 2023 she had been there nine years. Regulars call her “The Ring Lady.” She wears two silver rings to a finger. Before the market she was a loan officer and, for nearly twenty years, a barefoot water skier who became a world champion. Her first rings came from a friend who melted silver and lent her boxes of jewelry to sell. She calls much of her stock “grandma’s jewelry box.” On Sunday, October 15, 2023, she cleared $1,100 in five hours.

“Everything you see on my table, everything I sell, is stuff that people throw away,” Morse said.

Diana Munoz fills the next booth with jewelry and suncatchers under the name Sunshower. “She’s always here, and the energy she brings to the market is great,” Munoz said. “She’s a staple.” Down the row, Rylee Brown-Moore of Rylee’s Runway sells resale clothing and buys Morse’s rings.

Jason Lemons of Lucky Lemons told KING 5 in 2018 what the stall meant to him: “I sell vintage clothing. The market means everything to me. It’s one of the main reasons why I get to do this for a living.” That year the station’s viewers voted the market the best thrifting in Western Washington.

From a London market to the Ship Canal

The market was founded by Jon and Candace Hegeman. The accounts of how they found the idea differ in their particulars. The Madison Park Times wrote in 2014 that the couple were living in Europe when Candace, a craftsperson and designer, began spending time in the markets there, especially on Portobello Road in London, where she was a vendor. The Daily wrote in 2025 that the idea came from living in London and vending at Camden Market in the 1970s.

“They are very colorful and an important part of the European culture,” Jon Hegeman said.

Hegeman is from New Hampshire and went to college in upstate New York. When he came back from Europe in 1981, the air traffic controllers’ strike interrupted his trip home to the East Coast. By the Times’s account, he never finished that trip. He worked in advertising, and the markets began as a weekend hobby. “Eventually, the weekend hobby overtook the career path,” he said.

The Fremont market opened in the fall of 1990, with encouragement from local authorities. It followed the European mixed model: a flea market, a crafts market and a farmers’ market at once. On November 5, 1990, the Post-Intelligencer photographer Saul Bromberger photographed three children there, Corey Gallagher, 5, Sam Sparks, 3, and Jama Gerhart, 4. They were playing in a canoe that was for sale while their parents shopped.

After about five years Fremont became mostly a flea market. Hegeman later judged that a very good change. “We let the markets be what they want to be,” he said. By 1999, by the organization’s own account, the market had spawned sister farmers’ markets in Ballard, Madrona and Wallingford. That same year HistoryLink counted the Sunday flea market among the things that expressed Fremont’s playful spirit. Its list also included the Summer Solstice parade and the welcome signs that tell visitors to the “Center of the Universe” to set their watches back five minutes. Hegeman uses that name for the market itself.

The Hegemans retired in 2008, and their son, Ryan Reiter, became president of Northwest Marketplaces, which runs the market. “It’s meant to be a little unpolished and curbside,” Reiter said in 2025. “I think that’s its appeal.”

Gates, masks and a roof under the bridge

In March 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic closed the market. It reopened on Sunday, September 6, 2020, with a gated entry and exit, temperature checks, required masks and limits on how many people could be inside. Prepared food was not allowed. Kathmandu Momocha sold its Nepali dumplings frozen, and Piroshky Piroshky sold its goods to go. The market had room for 40 vendors that fall.

The market closed again for the winter. It reopened for its 31st season on March 7, 2021, with 70 vendors where there had been 140, and two shoppers allowed per booth. Daniel Sullivan of Shipwreck Apiaries had been selling raw honey from the Snoqualmie Valley there for seven or eight years. “The thing that’s really nice about the Fremont Sunday Market is the fact that it’s one of the oldest markets around since Pike Place,” he said.

The pandemic also changed where the market spends the winter. To keep it open in the cold months, it moved under the Fremont Bridge. That arrangement has lasted. Each year from November to March the market sets up one block east at 701 N. Northlake Way, under a roof and among patio heaters. The Daily put winter attendance at about 7,000 people each Sunday, against some 15,000 on a busy summer day. In 2026 the move came on November 1, and DJ Matt Baloogz was booked to play under the bridge.