Treasure awaits.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan
An old grocery store at 111 Second Avenue is reopening this weekend with a very different stock: yoga mats at the deli counter, picture frames in the produce, and 124 microwaves down two aisles. There’s one armchair, one armoire, one pair of ballet pointe shoes, and 37 desk lamps. But there are no cashiers.
That’s because all of it is free, courtesy of NYU’s first Swap Shop, which opens on Saturday to students only and will reopen daily until its shelves are bare. The goods aren’t coming from the university; almost everything on the shelves came from the donation bins at six dorms last spring, and an undergrad-led pilot project has been organizing the piles into something resembling a store. “We just want to help students stop items from entering the waste cycle,” says Kate Koblegarde, an environmental econ major who proposed the idea in student government, then worked throughout the summer to get it off the ground: clearing out the storefront, testing the items, cleaning them, and figuring out how to open a retail space. “We’re trying to make secondhand items more convenient than new items.”
NYU’s dorm-trash problem is so well known that treasure hunters scour the piles outside the dorms for AirPods and designer shoes. (The Swap Shop does have one pair of Louboutins and a working Xbox.) But the trash isn’t just a rich-kid problem. Most undergrads are from out of state, and the school is actually No. 1 in the country for the sheer number of international students (21,000). Are they supposed to pack a Brita on a long-haul flight? Or store it in Manhattan? In the past, NYU has gotten help from charitable organizations that pick up the bins and use or sell whatever is salvageable. But the stuff doesn’t make it back to students, who come back to Target the next fall to buy another Brita pitcher or space heater. “Almost everyone is left with no option but to buy stuff there,” said Koblegarde, who knows what it’s like — she flies in every school year from Oregon.
Don’t even try to get in without a student ID. Staff will scan them at the door.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan
The idea itself isn’t new. Free stores and community fridges sprouted across the city in the early years of the pandemic, and other schools do a version of this swap shop, running thrift stores or making giveaway bags of tossed dorm essentials for incoming freshmen. Some run shops for students depending on their scholarship status. But Koblegarde didn’t know of another swap shop where there are no preconditions and no price stickers, which felt important if she was going to win over busy New Yorkers, who can just click a button on Amazon. And its simplicity streamlines the marketing pitch. “Please, please don’t buy a microwave,” Koblegarde says in a video tour of the store that now has 54,000 views. “Because we have one for everyone you know.”
The store itself is being temporarily recycled. The old grocery store on the ground floor of 111-113 Second Avenue was donated, rent-free, by NYU, which owns the building, a former concert hall that became the original Tisch School of the Arts and now holds dance classrooms upstairs. A 38,000-square-foot space on the ground floor has been leased to a rotating cast of grocery stores since 1974: an Associated, then a Met Food, then a co-op, then the independently owned New Yorkers Food Market, whose owner closed it down in 2023 after losing too much business to the new Wegmans on Astor Place. That grocery left behind the shelving and aisles that a swap shop might need — but they were covered in dust when Misty Germany, an NYU facilities employee, arrived to clear out the space in May. “It was a dust bowl,” she joked. The dust is now clear, but the old grocery-aisle signs are still up. A cash register, now useless, has been pushed to the side.
Shoes, clothes, yoga mats, and skateboards surround an old deli counter.
Photo: Adriane Quinlan
On Thursday, staff members, a mix of NYU employees and students, were getting ready for opening day. Germany was giving a tour, two student employees were sewing patches onto their staff T-shirts, and Koblegarde was checking over inventory in the kitchen aisle. There were mugs and plates, spoons and forks, but she was after gadgets. “Were there any pepper grinders?” a friend had texted her to ask. There didn’t seem to be. But somehow, unopened, in its original packaging was a milk frother. “That’s really nice,” she said. Maybe she would take it.
The NYU Swap Shop opens at 111 Second Avenue on Saturday, August 23. Hours are daily, 10 to 4, as long as supplies last. Depending on the pilot, the shop may reopen each semester. Info on the store’s Instagram page.