Once upon a time in the land of ten thousand lakes, a massage parlor was shut down by the law for being a brothel. In Minnesota, puritanical sensibilities are the norm and anything that even vaguely reminds people of scandal offends these, so no one wanted to rent commercial space in the building where such a dubious enterprise had been located.
The owner of this besmirched property - an east coast transplant that had purchased the place for a great price, whom shall here be called 'Bob' - consequently found himself holding a commercial real estate lemon. At loose ends, Bob found an events organizer who was well-known in the community and talked this fellow into doing something in the vacant retail space. This events organizer - whom shall here be call alsoBob - then came to me to ask what I thought might be done with the place.
We did a little brainstorming and lots of research. Before long, we decided to slap together a weekly market, and brought this back to Bob:
Icon Attribution
Bob was thrilled. He told alsoBob and I that he would pay for anything we wanted to do with the property. He gave us a tour of the place and promised to get rid of the coin operated condom machine that had recently been pulled off the wall of a back room.
This seemed like an excellent opportunity. We could use the property rent-free for community events, and did not even have to worry about covering the cost of incidental expenses ourselves.
How could alsoBob and I say no to a deal like that?
So we brought in a couple of additional people (Alice and alsoAlice, for convenience sake) and got a bunch of peddlers together. Then we started doing 'flea market style events' - which were designed to maintain the regulatory profile of neighborhood garage sales, and so were not technically flea markets - and soon had a nice mix of vendors peddling assorted hand-crafted products and all kinds of second-hand goods every weekend.
Bob had a banner printed up for us and alsoAlice enthusiastically used washable paint to tell everybody that we were in business:
Bob made sure that our events well-stocked with festive, attention-getting balloons and various snacks. There was always free coffee and was often live music. We kept everything extremely simple, and had lots of fun.
Every week, a map like this - generated from vendor location preferences indicated on online registration forms - was posted at the building's entrance:
Before long, the place had become a regular community spot. People were showing up just to hang out. The market was then featured in a local college newspaper article. Despite getting some key facts wrong, this article nicely captured the grassroots community spirit of what we were doing, and its intro accurately described the scene at one of our Caravan 'flea market style' events:
"Its name may evoke images of world-weary, billowy-pantaloon-wearing, vaguely late 19th century merchants packing and unpacking their wares while someone, somewhere, is reading a crystal ball. However, the breezy atmosphere inside the storefront that houses the Caravan Flea Market is sunny and fresh — bringing with it a unique take on both sides of the micro-market experience."
As our last scheduled market approached, Bob told alsoBob and I that he wanted us to come up with a long term plan to turn his property into a profitable artisan retail hub, and said he would pay whatever money it took to get a permanent and stable business going there as long as we did all the work. Having anticipated this due to Bob's not-very-subtle hinting around, alsoBob and I told Bob that we were prepared to turn the place into a viable makerspace with its own product lines and retail store if he was serious about financing our vision. Bob told us that he was indeed serious, and very much wanted us to get this project going as quickly as possible.
Shortly after the last Caravan event, we had a four-person management team, a dedicated marketing whiz, and a dozen local artisans ready to go - all of us eager to begin transforming the property into an awesome collaborative enterprise. We had all the equipment necessary to seed a makerspace - from hand tools to industrial grade manufacturing equipment - and had formed relationships with local business which made everything required to set the retail shop up available to us at heavily discounted prices. We had a schedule for filing legal paperwork and reasonable insurance quotes. We had tens of thousands of dollars worth of saleable, high quality inventory ready to hit the shelves as soon as shelves got put up.
In short, our ducks were pretty much in a row. But twelve hours before our crew was set to arrive and begin making the retail space into a store, Bob told alsoBob and I that he'd changed his mind about the whole thing. In other words, Bob had wasted a bunch of our time. So everybody moved on with their lives.
Though Bob went to sometimes comical lengths to avoid alsoBob and I subsequent to this, our community events had effectively washed the scandal off of Bob's commercial property, so he never again had a problem finding retail tenants.
A couple of years later, Bob died of a heart attack.
Neither alsoBob nor I attended Bob's funeral, but we do still occasionally talk about how cool that makerspace would've been.
The end.