‘How much for Tigerland?” asks the young guy strolling up to an early morning yard sale in the Annex.

“One dollar.” 

“Done,” he proclaims without an inkling of hesitation, “I love that movie.” But while completing the transaction, he interjects, “Yeah, I need to have a garage sale in the next couple weeks.”

If you get right down to the particulars, this exchange seems almost absurd. Why would someone whose place is so cluttered that he intends to hold his own garage sale go ahead and add a used VHS copy of a questionable Colin Farrell flick to his collection? Why not just not buy the DVD? Why not just walk past the woman seated amongst a collection of random china and abstract paintings and not be tempted to buy anything, even for a dollar?

Well, that kind of behaviour would go against the logic of garage sales. The logic that presupposes there is a market for things like Jurassic Park on VHS, used printers and outdated accounting software, IQ 2000, the 1981 version of Trivial Pursuit, a half-carton of disposable Froot Loops cameras, a Super-8 film splicer and a hardcover edition of Charlton Heston Presents The Bible (complete with certificates of endorsement from a rabbi, a priest and Mr. Cold Dead Hands himself). Because when these (arguably) useless articles are all laid out on plastic tables or tarp-covered lawns and affixed with masking-tape price tags, their value is surprisingly profound.

Over the course of the past few weekends, armed with a list of destinations culled from various online listings, a selection of rough Google maps and a perverse sense of adventure, I pedalled my way through countless neighbourhoods deep into the heart of garage-sale culture. In these amateur approximations of an open-air free market I witnessed elderly ladies contemplate the relative length of fake flower stems, a travel photographer attempting to unload his hand sanders and framed prints before leaving for Brussels the very next day, and two gentlemen selling in the alley behind Bloor and Brunswick who seemed to relish the opportunity for fast talking, deal hustling and anecdotal fake origins for anything and everything at their table.
Initially I’m intrigued by such a cross-section of people unafraid of subjecting their material worth to the scrutiny of strangers. But mostly I’m convinced that garage sales have very little to do with buying and selling (OK, I admit I bought the Heston Bible, but only as a joke gift for my archaeologist brother who absolutely loathes misappropriated historicizing) and that the real value of any transaction is in the community interaction it generates. You know that saying, “It’s the journey not the destination”? On the front yards and driveways of Toronto it’s the conversation about why someone has five extra coffee makers, not the fact that they are only $3.

Clearly, garage sales aren’t about profit. Nor are they about convenience. If any of the people holding sales were after either, they could have just as easily posted pictures and a phone number on craigslist, or simply put the stuff up for auction on eBay. But a garage sale — which involves inviting strangers into your personal space in order to offer them your personal belongings — requires a rather muted sense of attachment, infinite patience and a serious lack of inhibition about personal taste. And if you do the math for the Parkdale couple who were humbly ecstatic over the $12 they had made, the wages work out to something like two dollars an hour.

A garage sale is essentially a pretext for social interaction. It turns the materialistic impulse of selling into an exchange that usually amounts to giving household items away to those who need them practically for free; like charity without guilt or communism without a dictator. Gretchen M. Herrmann argued as much in her decade-old paper What Changes Hands in the US Garage Sale. And her theory goes on to explore the idea that the gift-giving doesn’t simply end with flexible prices but extends out into the community; an idea that prefigures some of the active urbanism we know and love in this city.

In Toronto, garage sales are considerably low-key affairs. For the most part, they serve the immediate vicinity of their own neighbourhoods. The photographer leaving the country didn’t even advertise on craigslist until really last minute the night prior. He’d already had a sale three weeks before, he tells me, that was swarmed by his neighbours and over in about an hour and figured the word on the street would take care of itself. The young woman selling Tigerland says she set up at such a ridiculous hour (7:30am according to her posting) because a lot of people in her neighbourhood get up “way too early.” And earlier in the weekend, I visited a content sale where the petite blond woman in charge knew nearly everyone who passed her place by name and told them all to invite their friends.

So here we have people comfortable enough with their neighbours that they can anticipate their habits and can even count on them to generate an inter-neighbourhood buzz around their event. At the same time, garage sales allow public and private space to converge in a way that’s functional rather than critical. Not to knock the social experiments and flash-mob mentality of Newmindspace and their ilk, but the social experience of hanging out in some stranger’s front yard seems far more natural, even genuine. Garage sales engage the same kind of community celebration, but without the cloudy meta-ness that make public pillow fights seem wholly self-congratulatory, if not slightly pointless. Appropriately, the content-sale woman likened the whole experience of inviting people into her house to having a lot of parties. Except, I guess, for the expectation that the guests leave with all your stuff.

Since I don’t live in any of these neighbourhoods, the whole experience for me was more along the lines of urban exploration. Though I am by no means an expert in the field, there’s a lot to be learned from actually trying to find your way through completely unknown areas. Not only did I discover at least three new parks, locate a potential apartment next to High Park and chart a better shortcut through Parkdale, I think I finally figured out how to navigate the streets intersecting Dundas West where it veers up towards Junction-land.

But every time I found myself absorbing the vibe of a particular neighbourhood, I was also able to penetrate the unspoken barrier of sidewalk observation and essentially enter people’s homes — meeting the people who lived there and looking out at the street from their perspective. It wasn’t quite equal to a David Lynchian episode of identity-swapping transcendence, but close.
Sure, I saw a great many corners of the city and met a bunch of interesting people, but I did encounter a lot of rain and had to pass on anything that wouldn’t fit in my backpack. Actually, other than the Heston Bible, all I bought was a copy of Bob Dylan’s Desire on vinyl — which is probably considered failure by garage-sale shopping standards. Still, after years of malls and convenience stores and online shopping, I admit I was almost stunned to hear someone ask if there was anything I needed and feel like they might just go back down into their basement and try to find whatever it was I required.