Topanga Vintage Market

On the fourth Sunday of the month, cars turn off Victory Boulevard at Mason Avenue into Parking Lot 7 at Pierce College, the big north lot of the campus in the West San Fernando Valley. From seven in the morning, with early birds welcome, until two in the afternoon, the asphalt holds the Topanga Vintage Market. The market counts more than 200 antique and vintage dealers, about three dozen local artists, a line of food trucks, and an average of 3,000 shoppers. It runs rain or shine, keeps no December date, and closes its 2026 season on November 22.

Parking Lot 7 on the fourth Sunday

Artists Alley comes first. The founders, Patrice Curedale and Lori Rotblatt, are both artists, and they set the section at the front of the market. Here local makers sell only what they designed or made themselves: jewelry, woodworking, prints, clothing, soap, candles, fine art. Family art businesses are allowed.

Past the alley, the main market keeps one rule. Every item must be at least 20 years old, or made from something that is. Within that limit a dealer may specialize in one thing, such as vintage magazines, or mix in “everything from victorian cigar snippers to 1970’s wrangler jeans,” as the market’s own page puts it. Curedale’s list of what turns up runs to jewelry and fashion, furniture, automobilia, ephemera, horror movie props, vintage Pyrex, rock’n’roll T-shirts and vinyl, and mid-century pieces, “mixed with loads of the unexpected.” Holiday goods appear all year, and the market says the aisles fill with them beginning in October. A Daily News piece from January 2020 offered newcomers a short glossary: antique means at least 100 years old, ephemera means old paper items, and a tchotchke is a small decorative object.

The food trucks are inside the lot and serve for the full seven hours. The rotating roster has included Vchos, Cousins Maine Lobster, Thai Mex Cocina, Baby’s Bad Ass Burgers, and Matt’s Coffee. On September 28, 2025, a reporter for The Roundup, the Pierce College paper, found the air smelling of coffee, burgers, and pupusas. Music came from speakers and from Lunoi Mitani, a violinist who plays at the market every month for tips.

Some small customs belong to the founders. The market’s sticker tickets carry slogans such as “Hoarder With Order” and “Vintage Vixen,” and Curedale counts more than 150 of them. The market has run an “instavintage” photo contest. In 2017 its winner received $20 in Vintage Bucks to spend at the booths, a currency that, by Curedale’s description, looks like Monopoly money stamped with the market’s logo.

Booths and the people in them

Many sellers come every month to the same spot. Curedale has described those spots as little shops open one day a month, each with its own regular customers. Some dealers also work the larger Los Angeles markets. Curedale told the Daily News in 2018 that others are first-timers “bringing out their grandmother’s things that haven’t seen the light of day for 60 to 100 years.”

The Roundup’s 2025 visit found a range of both. Heidi Perez drives in from Highland Park and has kept a booth for almost four years. “I try to sell at the Rose Bowl Flea and Pasadena City College Markets but this is my favorite flea. The people are just so nice,” she said. “I’ve been doing this since 1996. It was really hard in the beginning because I had little kids but, I’ve raised 6 kids and a grandson off of this.” Diane Owens, selling for the first time, had come from Joshua Tree with jewelry, some of it her own work and much of it vintage sourced from flea markets, swap meets, and garage sales. Jack Kalayjian has sold here since before the market came to Pierce, and was thinning his own collections. “I have too many Garfield’s, but I’m keeping those,” he said. Deedee Gordon, eight years at her booth, sells handcrafted laced clothing and vintage doilies.

Terri Endrodi of Itty Bitty Vintage Shop, whose home base is the high desert town of Piñon Hills, works markets across California. In 2018 she was setting up at Topanga with her 1962 Shasta Compact trailer as a backdrop because, she said, “It’s cuter than a U-Haul.” Her stock ran to signs, metal hotel chairs, rusty scales, and farmhouse furniture. “When you buy at a flea market, you’re getting the history and the story behind the piece that I picked up on a back road somewhere,” she said.

Curedale has written down what she has seen pass between booths. One summer a customer grew dizzy, and the seller gave her a seat in the shade and cold water and sent her husband to the info booth for help. The seller stayed beside the customer, holding her hand, until the paramedics came. A pottery seller let two small girls each pick out a piece as a present. A new seller asked for help finding a woman who had bought a chandelier months earlier, because she had found some of its missing crystal drops. Glenn Hendricks is always one of the first to arrive and the last to leave, which gives him time to help the vendors around him, especially first-timers. When Lori Rotblatt’s mother, Pauline Wolf, was fighting cancer, Hendricks sat with her at the market and told her about his own fight with colon cancer, and listened to hers. She died in June, and Curedale wrote that Rotblatt was overwhelmed by the sympathy from “our flea market family.”

Two mothers from Topanga

Curedale and Rotblatt met when their sons were in kindergarten together at Topanga Elementary. Both were single mothers, and both liked estate sales and thrifting. They wanted a living that left time for their children. They first tried selling at the Long Beach Antique Flea Market, which Curedale remembers as “a long drive and a loooooong day.” They looked at other markets. Pasadena City College was sold out and the Rose Bowl too big. Ventura’s Wednesday flea was not quite vintage enough, and the RG Canning market in Ventura was too infrequent and too far. They concluded that the Valley needed a flea market of its own.

Rotblatt brought an entrepreneurial background, and Curedale brought marketing and event planning. According to the Topanga Messenger in April 2012, they presented the idea of a high-end flea market to Westfield executives. The executives, “after initial skepticism,” decided it would suit the Promenade Mall. The market opened in April 2012 in a parking lot on the west side of Westfield Promenade, at the corner of Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Oxnard Street in Woodland Hills. Food and drink came from Youth Booths run by Topanga Elementary Charter School and other nonprofits as fundraisers, and shoppers wanting a larger meal walked to the mall’s restaurants.

The first show drew thousands of shoppers into the lot from several directions, and the founders had to open two more entrances on the spot, with friends and family stepping in to staff them. They picked the fourth Sunday on purpose. Pasadena City College held its market on the first Sunday, the Rose Bowl on the second, and Long Beach on the third, so the dealers from all three were free to come. Curedale has said that from the start they recruited dozens of sellers from that Los Angeles circuit.

A pumpkin patch and the road to Pierce

By the fall of 2013 the Promenade lot had become a pumpkin patch, and the market moved to Parking Lot 7 at Pierce College. Curedale told the Daily News in October 2013 that the move might be temporary. “We have the option to go back to Topanga after the holidays but we are really happy to be at Pierce,” she said. “We were happy with the way it was working but we were feeling a little squeezed.” The new lot let them add 20 vendors, for 180 in all, plus an art walk and food trucks. Gary Dent, who sold women’s clothing with his family as Papillon Vintage Shop, had six months at the market behind him and some worry about the move. “I guess my number one concern is how many of the shoppers that have become regulars at Topanga will come over to Pierce,” he said. “But in terms of the location I think it has lots of potential.” In Curedale’s later telling, the sellers and shoppers came along, and the market never went back.

Admission then was $2, or $5 for early birds between six and eight in the morning, with hours running to three in the afternoon. It was $3 in 2017 and $4 in 2020, and by 2026 it stood at $5, with children 12 and under free and veterans and a guest “Forever Free.”

In April 2014, at the market’s second birthday, Curedale wrote that she and Rotblatt each called it “my youngest child.” She raised a Royal Ruby Depression Ware goblet to the vendors she called the aunts and uncles of the village: Uncle Glenn, Miss La De Da, Cousin Shawn, Aunt Starlie, Sistah Marlena, Steve the Barker, Coach Bruce, Love Child Linda, and Grandpa Phil. A second event, the Topanga Vintage Festival, was set for June 1 of that year. A later note on the same post reports that it “was a blast, but too much for me and Lori to handle so we won’t be putting it on again.”

The founders say the market has since made more than a quarter million dollars for Pierce College. They chose the word “vintage” for its name to mean anything 20 years or older. That covers Rotblatt’s mid-century glass and Curedale’s aluminum, and it makes clear that the market sells nothing new, “even socks.” On the rest of the name, Curedale has offered one line: “Just don’t ask about the Topanga part. That’s a whole ‘nother story.”