Lyndale's Vintage Shops Rank Among the City's Best

Justin Schaefer opened Vintage in the 1936 building known as White Castle Building No. 8, which over the decades has housed an accordion store, a music nonprofit and an antique shop. He stocks apparel from the 1940s through the early 2000s alongside Gen X ephemera — action figures, alt-rock records, Pee-Wee Herman toys — and bills himself as the country's top dealer of Zubaz pants. The store opened Oct. 8 with a vintage market in the parking lot during Open Streets and now runs seven days a week, noon to 6 p.m.. Pop star Billie Eilish stopped in ahead of her Xcel Energy Center shows.

Vintage is the highest-profile of a cluster of resale shops that have opened on south Lyndale since the pandemic. A few blocks north, three sit nearly side by side: Final Stop Vintage at 2431 Lyndale Ave. S., Clubhouse Market at 2441 and Leisure World at 2457.

The concentration is what gives the corridor its draw. "With three shops in one block, you can make an afternoon of shopping vintage on Lyndale Avenue," the cluster's owners told Southwest Voices, and that foot traffic spills into the corridor's restaurants and other boutiques. The owners describe more camaraderie than rivalry. Leisure World co-owner Joe Giwoyna said there is "no real competition" because no two pieces of secondhand clothing are identical, and Clubhouse Market's Devyn Pineapple said he quickly bonded with the owner of Final Stop a few doors up.

The pitch lands hardest with younger shoppers, for whom thrifting is both a hedge against fast fashion and a creative practice, a shift that has pushed vintage from a budget fallback toward a sought-after style. As Lyndale heads into reconstruction, that secondhand reputation is one of the clearest assets the corridor can carry through the disruption: a street known for something specific holds shoppers better than an interchangeable strip.