By Ed Wendell
projectwoodhaven@gmail.com
WRBA President Martin Colberg made the rounds thanking all of the participants in last year’s Great Woodhaven Yard Sale, a community-wide yard sale that will take place this weekend on Saturday June 10th and Sunday June 11th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. To register, email thegreatwoodhavenyardsale@gmail.com or call the WRBA at 718-296-3735 and leave your name and contact information.
The Great Woodhaven Yard Sale is celebrating its 10th Anniversary this year and it looks like it will be the biggest one yet. Sponsored by the Woodhaven Residents’ Block Association (WRBA) since 2013, the Great Woodhaven Yard Sale (GWYS) is a coordinated effort to all have a community-wide yard sale on the same date.
So instead of you having your yard sale one weekend, your neighbors having theirs the next weekend, and the people across the street having theirs next month – the idea is to have all your yard sales on the same day. And since all your locations will be heavily advertised both inside and outside of Woodhaven, you will see a big increase in people visiting your sale
And for the first time, this year’s GWYS has been expanded to a 2-day event.
“There’s been a drumbeat the last few years of the event that setting up for just one day was kind of inefficient for participants,” says Vance Barbour, Director and Event Coordinator of the WRBA. And so, this year’s Great Woodhaven Yard Sale will take place on Saturday June 10th and Sunday June 11th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Barbour says that the WRBA is expanding their marketing of the GWYS to bring in more shoppers. “For the first event in 2013 we only had a tri-fold brochure that we handed out at WRBA Town Hall meetings and at the subway stations on Jamaica Avenue.”
“We now have social media presence on Facebook and Twitter, we place free and paid advertisements on places like Craig’s List New York and Facebook, and issue a press release to 32 local and regional news organizations. This year for the first time we will be listing the event on local and regional yard/garage sale websites,” he says.
To register for the 2023 Great Woodhaven Yard Sale email thegreatwoodhavenyardsale@
“Over the years we have had a number of calls from residents of Richmond Hill and Ozone Park who wanted to participate in the event, but we had to turn them away due to logistics,” Barbour explained.
“Placing them on The Map might make The Map illegible for participants who counted on it to find participating households. For the last two events we began attaching a list of household addresses to the map, which frees us up to accept households from our neighboring communities. While we will not be actively soliciting neighboring community households, we will not be turning them away either.”
One of the keys to making your yard sale successful is to get your neighbors involved. When the maps are distributed, people will tend to look for clusters so that when they visit one block they’ll have several yard sales to visit.
Once you sign up, give the information to your neighbors and ask them to pass along to their neighbors that they know. Even a few houses at the end of the block, or even around the corner, will help drive extra traffic to your doorstep.
Yard sales are a summer tradition around Woodhaven and it’s nice that there’s always a few here and there almost every weekend. But the Great Woodhaven Yard Sale is a terrific event, typically attracting more than 100 households and hundreds and hundreds of shoppers, from all around Queens
One year, we ran into a guy who had his arms full of stuff he’d bought at yard sales in Woodhaven. He was heading home to Glendale to drop off what he’d bought and rushing back to hit the rest of the houses on the map.
Make sure you get your household on the map so it’s a bunch of your stuff in people’s arms, taking it away to their home while leaving cash in the palm of your hand.
Now you know why they call the Woodhaven Yard Sale Great!
