Sidewalk Sales

One of my favorite summer activities in Northampton was going to the sidewalk sales that happened the last weekend of July. So last year I was eager to find some here but kept being disappointed as events that sounded like they might be similar definitely were not. Market Days, for example, turned out to be a street festival with music, drag shows, and lots of partying in Boystown. There are a lot of street festivals in Chicago and many of them do have vendor booths but not with sidewalk sale pricing.

So I was pretty excited when I found the Main Dempster Mile Sidewalk Sales in Evanston. We went last year and we found enough stores and bargains to make me happy. We returned this year and were pleasantly surprised to find, while searching for the Chalk Art Contest that we had heard was going on during the sidewalk sales, that there is also a downtown Evanston. It’s funny that while they’re both parts of Evanston and they were having sidewalk sales on the same day that they are marketed as seperate events. In fact, the woman with a booth near Dempster street who told us the Chalk Art Contest was downtown seemed doubtful that they were also having sidewalk sales.

Even more exciting was that the Andersonville neighborhood of Chicago was also having sidewalk sales this weekend. We had originally intended to go to both Evanston and Andersonville on Saturday but when Evanston turned out to be so much larger we postponed Andersonville to Sunday.

We found so many bargains to purchase that I’ll write about most of them in separate posts throughout the year but for starters here are some of our Evanston Ten Thousand Villages two dollar table finds. These bottle cap musicians from South Africa originally sold for sixteen dollars each.

They found a home on the CD bookcase.

And this bike riding zebra from Kenya that rode right on over to the top of the entry wall boxes originally cost $14.99. And that is why I love sidewalk sales!