If you are reading or listening to this on Sunday November 24th, this is one of the last three days that Sky Village Swap Meet will be open. Next Sunday on December 1st, the outdoor marketplace and village shops that have sat at the old drive-in movie theatre in Yucca Valley right off Old Woman Springs Road and Highway 62 will close down and the property will go up for sale. As for the vendors and shops that have been at the location for decades? It’s all up in the air. Here’s Debra Walters at Dakota Bob’s Western Wear…
“We haven’t thought about it yet. There are options that we’ve had given to us… but we shall survive. It’s a shame that it has to be done this way. This is different… this is community. This is like a family of people. Everybody comes on the weekends and its just the end of an era. It really is.”
The news spread fast on Friday, but on Saturday morning there were plenty of vendors and customers who were just hearing about it…
Market vendor: “I found out yesterday, so everything is on sale. I’m busy with my customers but you can buy something to help me out!”
Brett Fenwick has been coming out here since he was a kid scoring Nintendo and Playstation 2 games. Now he’s 25…
Brett: “Hopefully the next person turns it into a movie theater or realizes what this means to the community, because this is going to be a real big letdown for a lot of people. We’re losing more and more places like that all the time. And the more places they get rid of like this… like where you run into random people or people that are just sitting at home bored and say ‘I’m going to go walk around the swap meet for a little while.”
The story on why Sky Village is closing is out there, and we’re still talking with the folks who know it. In the meantime, the outdfoor marketplace is open today until 2:00 p.m.. Next weekend – their final weeknd- the hours are the same. They open at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday, 7:00 a.m. on Sunday, and closing for the final time at 2:00 p.m. on December 1st.
You still have time to come down… buy something to stick in the corner of your house so in the future that you can glance over at it and try to remember what it was like out here on warm weekends. Surrounded by treasures, junk, crystals, art, desert plants and the desert locals who have scratched out a unique spot here in the Morongo Basin to sell all sorts of stuff.
We’ll have more on the Sky Village Swap Meet and it’s abrupt closure on your z107.7 News later this week as we continue to report on this story.
Share your photos and stories about the Sky Village Outdoor Marketplace by emailing me at [email protected] or on Instagram @joshuatreenews
Visit Sky Village Swap Meet on their website and Instagram @skyvillage_outdoormarket
