The Swap Shop: Flea Market, Drive-In, and Florida Institution
Near Fort Lauderdale, Florida
The Fort Lauderdale Swap Shop opened on November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three, the same day John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, as the Thunderbird Drive-In Theater. Its founder, Preston Henn, added a flea market component after a trip to the West Coast in nineteen sixty-six, and the combination proved unstoppable.
By nineteen eighty the property had eleven drive-in screens. The Hanneford Family Circus performed here daily for seventeen years, from nineteen eighty-nine to two thousand six. At its peak the Swap Shop drew roughly twelve million visitors per year across its eighty acres of indoor and outdoor market space.
Today it still operates as a daily flea market, and its drive-in was among the largest in the United States.
