Five Stories of Memory at the Cambridge Antique Market

The shelves of the Cambridge Antique Market are filled with strange treasures: Beatles memorabilia and Playboy magazines in glossy sleeves, dusty globes that still sport the letters U.S.S.R. and niche Harvard collectibles, Twisted Sister records and “Hardy Boys” book series.

Situated along the O’Brien Highway and rated one of the best antique markets in New England by New England Collective, the Cambridge Antique Market is one of the largest of its kind in Massachusetts. It boasts five floors, over 150 vendor spaces, and holds 1 million incredible finds, according to its website. Tourists, locals, and college students alike visit the Market to explore the stories on the shelves. Among them are the occasional movie studios or celebrities, looking to add a pop of authenticity to their production or private collection.

Vendor Amy E. Moyer has interacted with some notable clients — including Sony Pictures for the 2019 film “Little Women,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ottessa Moshfegh, and several Harvard widows selling items from their spouses’ private collections, including a shadow box of fresco fragments from Pompeii.

Christina Hu, a tourist visiting from Hong Kong with a group of friends, heard about the Cambridge Antique Market through the popular Chinese social media app “Little Red Book” (小红书). She and her friends chose to spend their last day in Boston sifting through vintage designer clothes and multicolored jewelry.

Visitors and friends Chloe “Ceci” Kim, Sierra Moll, and Jocelyn Ju also discovered the store online. For Moll, while online shopping may give you exactly what you’re looking for, it’s not “more fun than picking through a bunch of random things.” It is ultimately the “thrill of the chase” that brings them to antiquing. For these friends, it isn’t the contents of their shopping bags that matters: It is the experience they have together on the hunt.

Visitor Jacqueline M. Najarro remarks that exploring the Market helped her get back into antiquing and thrifting. “I started coming here not too long ago. I kept passing by and thinking ‘Oh, my God, I need to come here,’” she says. “Because since I was little, I really loved going to flea markets with my mom.”

The Market also helped Jacqueline connect her love for thrifting to her passion for sustainability. Her favorite finds consisted of “cute vintage stuff and old things that I can hopefully upcycle.”

Kim, Moll, and Ju — all environmental science majors — are also concerned at how quickly consumer products are discarded. According to them, the beauty of thrifting lies in turning something that someone threw away into something new again.

Like many of the visitors to the Market, the trio enjoys repurposing their finds in creative ways. Moll once gave a large bag of stamps to a collage-making friend, who then repurposed the items — sticking them on anything from perfume bottles to custom birthday cards.

“You can follow the whole history of a person’s life” in these objects, says Celeste T. Zerner, a repeat visitor at the Market.

Zerner points out a white, porcelain tea set on display nearby with gold butterflies decorating the rim. To her, the set is more than just decorative houseware, but a memory kept “alive and well, somewhere in somebody’s house. Because you do change over the years, but then you see it and, geez, it’s a memory.”

“My husband and I had that same set when we got married,” she adds. “We’ve been married for 52 years, and that was our first set of dishes — the butterfly gold — and it’s still there.”

Out of curiosity, we ask Zerner whether she considered the Cambridge Antique Market a museum of memory. “For me, antiquing is about keeping the old going,” she says. “Not so much values or anything like that, but things from the past that remind you of your history, your family.”

As we leave the Cambridge Antique Market, shoppers are still pulling items from the shelf, imbuing each object with new life.

—Magazine writer Natalie F. L. Luera can be reached at Natalie Luera natalie.luera@thecrimson.com.