Who's the real Bill's Flea Market? Both say they are

VIRGINIA BEACH

You can't kill Bill's.

The flea market's been around Hampton Roads for 20 years, had its property leased out from under it, and its buildings - three separate ones - sold, torn down, scorched by fire.

But Bill's is like Whac-a-Mole, smack it down, it pops up somewhere else. Now, the mole has multiplied.

Any day, the son and namesake of Bill's founder, Bill Barry, will open the doors of a former Norfolk bowling alley on Military Highway as Bill's Flea Market. A classified ad calls that flea market "The Original Bill's."

In November, after a fire shut down Bill's on Virginia Beach Boulevard at Pembroke, Robin Barry resurrected the place in Chesapeake as The Flea Market at SoNo, touting it online as "Formerly Bill's Flea Market."

"That's my ex-wife," Bill Barry says of the South Norfolk flea market, "trying to use my name."

"If I wanted to steal his name," Robin Barry says, "I would have named this place 'Bill's Flea Market.' "

Divorced, the two now competing for vendors.

Robin Barry figures she's earned the trust of the stall owners in the aftermath of the fire a year ago this month that closed Bill's when it was on Virginia Beach Boulevard. Some vendors lost hundreds of dollars in goods, were uninsured and had to start over.

Robin Barry had been running Bill's for several years, she said, and she sat in the burned flea market parking lot, consoling vendors and bringing in pizza for lunch.

"For the last three years, up to the fire," Robin Barry says, "Bill Barry was nowhere to be found. It was me, me and more me."

Bill Barry concedes they were going through a divorce, and he got away to try his hand at the charter boat business. But he said he had helped his dad with the flea market since he was 18 and is the rightful person to carry the mantel.

"I'm the original Bill's," he said. "My father was Bill Barry, and he left me the market in the will in 1997."

The original Bill's was at Princess Anne Plaza in Virginia Beach, where the elder Bill Barry and his friends sold stuff in the parking lot to pass the time. After awhile, they moved inside but got chased out when the building was torn down for a Home Depot.

He found a new building and moved to Witchduck Road, but that, too, was sold. He moved into the former FX electronic store near Pembroke in 1992, painting 10-foot-square grids on the floor to mark off spaces for vendors.

The store once enticed shoppers with robot mannequins and a pulsating sound and light display, so it was a U-turn for the building when vendors erected scores of makeshift plywood walls on the grid s to protect their wares.

Last March, a spark from a nearby business set ablaze the old FX building and made it structurally unsafe. Earlier this week, a second fire finished the job and burned it to the ground.

Robin Barry finally found an old Earl's supermarket and People's Drug on Bainbridge Boulevard in South Norfolk. She opened in early December, bringing a couple dozen vendors from the old Bill's with her.

Bill Barry, who along with his sister is opening Bill's in Norfolk, says he's scooping up vendors from the old Bill's because he's got a good location on Military Highway.

"She's got some, I got some," Bill Barry said of the vendors.

But Norfolk city officials and people from the surrounding neighborhood are miffed that the new Bill's bypassed a 4-year-old ordinance to stop the spread of flea markets. Because Bill's is an indoor market, it doesn't violate the law.

Robin Barry sees that as a competitive advantage for her South Norfolk flea market. She's allowed to have outdoor tables, and come spring, she will.

"They may do real well there; they're on a busy road," she said of the new Bill's on Military Highway.

She paused.

"But they won't have an outside."

Lon Wagner, (757) 222-5119, lon.wagner@pilotonline.com