As of today, the Board of Adjustment has yet to rule on the appeal of Casas' permit.
The appeal, as it turns out, was filed by Mark Overton. Overton is a co-owner of Saxquest, a woodwind instrument shop on Antique Row. He's the sitting president of CARMA. He couldn't attend the appeal hearing because he was out of town.
Overton says CARMA has since voted to support the Swap Meet, provided that Casas brings his vendors into compliance with city laws. Casas and CARMA have not yet agreed on what exactly that would look like.
"I'm all for the swap meet," Overton says. "It seems like everyone's making a big deal about semantics."
The only other document in opposition in the Board of Public Service's file on the Swap Meet is a letter from Patricia Dorn. In the letter, Dorn says that she bought the building on the 1900 block of Cherokee 34 years ago. It's now her home and the site of her longtime antique shop, Remember When.
"I hope [the Swap Meet] keeps bringing people down here," Dorn says. "I wish them the best, I just think they should pay for a license like we do."
But hadn't she written in her letter that the Swap Meet would have "a negative effect" on the value of her building?
Dorn replies: "I didn't write that letter. The lady who works for me wrote it."
That lady is Shirley Wallace. As the only person to testify against the Swap Meet at two public hearings, Wallace has become its most vocal adversary.
Wallace has a history of resisting change on Cherokee. In fact, in 2007, the Cherokee Station Business Association, or CSBA, which is CARMA's counterpart on the west side of Jefferson, requested that the Gravois Park neighborhood stop sending Wallace as a liaison to their meetings. Wallace had called them "drug dealers and anarchists," the CSBA complained in a letter, and opposed both the Cinco de Mayo festival and public art installations (one of which she ripped off a building with her bare hands).
According to the minutes of Casas' conditional use hearing back on December 18, Wallace testified that the Swap Meet "will not be a good fit for the area" and "that mostly bar owners are in support of the market." At the May 20 appeal hearing, she defended the veteran dealers: "If you're going to charge all these people that are already there and that spent fifty years building this street so that it would be attractive to a flea market on the corner, then somebody needs to make sure that you follow city rules."
Wallace herself does not own any real estate or businesses on Antique Row, a public records search showed, although she is the current treasurer of CARMA and publicly represents Dorn.
Asked several times for an interview, Wallace e-mailed her response: "No."
On a recent Sunday during the Swap Meet, a half-dozen customers flip through LPs at Tim Hendrickson's tiny record store on Antique Row, Dead Wax.
"I'm really out of patience with the naysayers," says Hendrickson, who also reports record sales during the Swap Meet. "It's illogical to the point of downright stupidity to be against this."
One of his shoppers is Jose Estela, who handcrafts leather goods such as wallets. Estela has rented a booth at the Swap Meet to launch his new business, Smith & Kings. He has a license, pays taxes, and aims to scale up.
The Swap Meet, he says, "teaches me how to do it it on a small scale first."
If artisans like him attract new foot traffic to the street, he says, that's not stealing.
"If it wasn't there before," he says, "it wasn't yours to lose."
Jovanka Hammond, the antique dealer just two blocks from the Swap Meet, says she isn't afraid of competition anyway.
"I know I can stand up to them," she says. Hammond has been selling books and antiques on Cherokee for 35 years.
Hammond welcomes the newcomers. "The more the merrier," she says, "and the bigger the pie is."
"You always have to bring in new people," she continues. But she has no plans to get swallowed up by the Swap Meet: "I'll probably have to die to leave here."
