‘The Mother of All Yard Sales’ to Hit Adams Morgan This Weekend
Bargain hunters in search of clothes, housewares and home decor might have some luck in the Adams Morgan area this weekend.
About 40 yard sales in Adams Morgan and Lanier Heights are slated for the annual “The Mother of All Yard Sales” Saturday.
The sales, which center around Biltmore Street and Lanier Place NW, are set to start between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. and end between noon and 3 p.m. (Click on the map to the left to see all the participants.)
Tryst (2459 18th St. NW), Urban Dwell (1837 Columbia Road NW) and other area businesses also will have specials for yard sale shoppers who show this image.
Local Josh Gibson, the organizer of The Mother of All Yard Sales since 2014, said the neighborhood shopping extravaganza “will rock [shoppers’] worlds, then hand their hat back to them.”
Gibson, who is also the D.C. Council staffer behind the body’s Twitter account, added in an email to Borderstan:
There was a biennial Biltmore Street Yard Sale on the Saturday before Memorial Day weekend (our date too, but we had to postpone until tomorrow b/c of rain) that dates back decades. The 2013 sale was the 15th biennial sale, so that means it started in…1980? It was always centered on Biltmore, but the surrounding streets (Mintwood, Allen Place, 20th St., etc.) also participated.
I always loved shopping at the sale, but in 2014, my mom moved from Bethesda into our building on Lanier Place. She was downsizing, and I had had a lot of stuff stored with her, so we basically had a ton of stuff to sell. So much that we couldn’t even take advantage of the few spaces on Biltmore reserved for non-residents… too much to bring too far.
The longtime organizer of the Biltmore sale, Larry Karr, has recently passed away, and a woman named Bambi Kraus had taken it over. I reached out to her with the idea of adding a second core area, Lanier Place, to the sale. It turns out she was looking to transition out of running the sale, so I inherited it. This is my third year running it. I decided to make Adams Morgan-wide, and dubbed it The Mother of All Yard Sales.
We want this to be the immaculate yard sale. The worst thing about most yard sales is that you decide to part with something, it doesn’t sell at the sale, it’s too nice to throw out, arranging to donate it is too much of a pain, so it just comes back into your house. What we did to fix this was to work with Mary’s Center to have a truck visit each interested sale at closing time, and take away any unsold items. It’s a hassle to coordinate, but we’ve donated two large trucks full of items to help Mary’s Center.
Image courtesy of Josh Gibson
