A day in the life of the Queens Night Market
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The Queens Night Market began its 10th year this spring. Over the past decade, the affordable food market has become an icon of the borough. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach
By Ryan Schwach
Just past 7 a.m. on a cold Saturday morning in a parking lot in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, John Wang, the 43-year-old man who 10 years ago turned this lot into the site of the Queens Night Market, had a quiet moment.
In around nine hours, the lot will be bustling with thousands of New Yorkers tasting food from around the world, listening to music and spending a Saturday night with friends and family in an institution that has become a symbol of the borough it calls home.
For now though, the lot is nearly empty.
Wang had mornings like this before, around 300 of them.
Almost every summer Saturday for the last decade, Wang and his team get to the lot around 6 a.m., 10 hours before the market opens, and they don’t leave until everything is packed up. That doesn’t normally happen until 2 a.m.
“You don’t get used to it,” said Wang. “When we all get home, we just crash.”
Wang sat at a table with his small four-man setup crew, eating a breakfast consisting of empanadas and chicharones, two foods likely to be offered to the attendees who will soon flood the lot. The market will open at 4 p.m. that night.
The Queens Night Market first launched in 2015, and is celebrating its 10th season.
It has become an iconic Queens event, now bringing together over 100 vendors selling everything from Pakistani biryani to Himalayan momos, to merchandise like eccentric earrings, pillows shaped like MetroCards and advertising prints from the 1940s.
In a recent article, food-outlet Eater described the Queens Night Market as a “bazaar at the crossroads of the world.”
When Wang started the market a decade ago, it was just him and a few volunteers.
Now the crew – while still small – includes a handful of employees to set up, as well as electricians, bartenders and a few other helpers.
The morning crew on May 10, the first market of the 10th season, were all young Corona residents.
John wang and his setup team eat breakfast before a long day setting up the Queens Night market. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach
“We all live around here,” said Richie Ledesma, a college student in his third year at the Queens Night Market. “I helped out and I guess John liked me.”
7:45 a.m.
Ledesma was in the process of filling several sandbags, which will be used to anchor the army of orange and blue Mets-colored tents strewn about the parking lot and the adjacent street.
Wang took a broom and began using it to sweep water out of pot-holes and crevices in the pavement. The work is a far cry from what he was doing a decade ago.
Ten years ago, Wang was an unemployed mergers and acquisitions lawyer living in Manhattan, looking for something to be passionate about.
Inspired by the night markets of his native Taiwan, the Texas-raised 33-year-old began cold emailing vendors.
He wanted the market to be different from other New York City and American food markets, set at night because it's cooler and easier for people to attend.
His guiding principle – make diverse food and merchandise cheap and accessible.
The goal has led to the creation of one of the Queens Night Market’s biggest allures – a $6 price cap on all food sold at the market. The price cap has stood regardless of inflation or the increasing costs of goods.
It’s a draw in 2025 the same way it was in 2015, when the market first opened with around 20 vendors. Even in its first year, crowds began pouring in by the thousands, Wang said.
“Vendor recruitment has been easy since then,” Wang said.
8:45 a.m.
Wang had constantly checked his phone’s weather app, attempting to gauge the wind levels, which had been whipping throughout the morning. A few moments later, tents began toppling one by one.
Weather has always been a worry for Wang. This year, he had to postpone the opening of the market twice because of bad forecasts.
Wang recalled one year when rain came out of nowhere, in defiance of the forecast. Improbably, it seemed that the surrounding areas were completely dry, and only the night market was affected by the rain.
“It was the most bizarre thing,” he said. “We were underwater but no one else was.”
9 a.m.
On the other side of the lot, Ledesma and his older cousin, Nico Guzman, were setting up more tents.
“This started really small, we only had three people in the morning,” said Guzman, who latched onto the market in its first few seasons.
Setting up tents. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach
For years now, Guzman has been doing the same work, setting up tents, anchoring them with sandbags and keeping the site clean and orderly.
The repetition, early mornings and late nights have never bothered him, he said, in part, because of his experience as a Marine Corps reservist.
“I’m used to it,” he said.
He got Ledesma involved, along with other friends over the years, many of whom couldn’t hack the long days.
“I’ve had other friends work and they’ll be like, ‘How do you do this?’” he said. “They don’t believe me until they do it.”
Despite the demanding schedule, Guzman, like many of the others, just keeps coming back.
“It’s Queens in a way,” he said. “It’s all family and friends here.”
That’s a culture Wang has tried to instill not just in his team, but in the market itself.
“It feels like the whole city is out having a good time,” Wang said about the market.
And he’s glad attendees have fun because it makes the crush of work worth it.
“I’m sure they don’t [know what goes into creating the market], but before I started doing it I had no idea either,” he said. “Little did I know what I was getting myself into.”
10:15 a.m.
Around two hours after they first started, the morning crew of the Queens Night Market were still installing tents.
While Wang admitted the tents may not be convenient to set up for the vendors, he has always provided them so that every vendor has an even, 10-square-foot playing field.
Every week, Wang takes around 45 minutes setting up a map of the market’s vendors, pending any late cancellations or no shows. He seems to have it to an exact science, calling out to his team where certain vendors’ tents should go like a professional chess player playing an entire match in their head.
“For the first five years, all of this was learning as I went,” he said. “It was a steep learning curve.”
Queens Night Market founder John Wang. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach
But Wang hasn’t been alone while figuring out how to run the Queens Night Market. By his side since the very beginning has been Sharon Medina, the market’s only full-time employee.
While she is technically listed as the vice president of the night market, she said she does a little bit of everything, from social media to logistics.
Medina “roped herself in” a few weeks before the night market’s birth in 2015.
An event planner and marketer for Nordstrom, Medina was living in Forest Hills when she first heard of the market, and reached out to Wang seeing if he needed help.
He reached back out to her the day of the first night market, seeing if she’d come lend a hand. She did, and has not looked back.
“Can’t kick me out now,” she said.
Throughout the day, Medina helped set-up and organize, and troubleshoot.
“People don’t realize it's just me, and John and our guys,” she said. “But it’s a well-oiled machine.”
Even though she now drives in from New Jersey, the uniqueness of the market keeps her coming back.
“Its something special,” she said. “Its like a block party every Saturday.”
1:30 p.m.
With the market’s opening getting closer, security officers began setting up the market’s entrances and blocking off streets within the Hall of Science’s campus.
On one end of the lot, vendors began showing up, creating a long line of cars waiting to get checked in by Ledesma and security.
A few feet away, Medina used orange and blue solo cups to spell out “Let’s go Knicks” in the fence.
“Its usually ‘Let’s go Mets,’” she said.
On the other side of the lot, Wang fiddled with a speaker system that would soon broadcast his “ol’ reliable playlist,” which he said has come to annoy many of the market’s bartenders.
“Its a lot of Paul Simon,” he said.
Queens Night Market founder John Wang.Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach
Vendors started pulling into the lot, backing their cars, trucks and U-Hauls into their designated spots, unloading large containers of food and cooking equipment.
2 p.m.
By mid-afternoon, Wang’s day enters a new phase.
Running from one end of the lot to another, Wang had to take a moment to help a vendor whose car had stalled.
He was addressing multiple issues at once, including urgently radioing Medina to inform her she had left out the apostrophe in “Let’s Go Knicks.”
He called Ledesma and told him to start calling vendors who hadn’t checked in yet. Those who showed up on time were beginning to see their set ups take shape.
Kachamorich, a Bangladeshi-street food vendor, had mini rickshaws and ornate lamps on their table. They are only in their second year at the market.
“It felt like the best place,” said owner Mazifa Tasnim. “It’s great, hopefully we’ll go 10 years more.”
Nat Krieger sells old-school merchandise like 80’s baseball cards and prints of advertisements from magazines and periodicals going back nearly a century. He described his wares as “old Americana.”
“This is a fun market,” he said. “A family atmosphere.”
Vendors at the Queens Night market. Eagle photo by Ryan schwach
That atmosphere was beginning to come into view by mid-afternoon. Music was playing, vendors were nearly all set up and people were already waiting at the entrances.
And while the night was just about to get started, the crew had already experienced a full work day.
“We are running on adrenaline now,” said Guzman.
4 p.m.
Not long after the market opened, the site was transformed.
Visitors began filling in, lining up at popular stands, staking their claim to picnic benches and setting up blankets on the grass.
That’s when Wang decided to take a few moments to relax. He scooped a beer from a cooler and sat back on the same bench where he started his morning, and looked out at the growing crowd. There was a wave of satisfaction on his face.
Within minutes though, he was back up again, patrolling the market.
He occasionally chatted with vendors, some of whom had been selling their wares at the night market since the beginning.
There has been a sense of loyalty among the vendors at the night market, they told the Eagle. That loyalty has been created in part by an effort by Wang to keep things as fair as possible. He’s also attempted to keep vendor fees as low as possible.
He was even able to reduce the cost to vendors this year with the help of Citizens Bank, which jumped in as a sponsor to help cover the vendor fees.
7 p.m.
When the market is full, lines dot nearly every vendor stall. The open grassy area gets filled with couples and families enjoying a night with perfect weather. Kids kick around soccer balls and chase each other, weaving through the smattering of picnic blankets.
It feels far from Queens, far from New York City. The night market feels improbable, given both the amount of work that goes into it and the years that it has been able to survive in an increasingly expensive city.
The market is not directly surrounded by much. While the Mets play nearby and Corona and Flushing are just up the road, most who attend the Queens Night Market view it as the destination.
But it didn’t just materialize, and it didn’t pop out of nowhere.
It was a labor of love and anxiety from a man and a team that has been doing it week in and week out for a decade. It's a process, one of mental and physical labor. One can’t help but wonder why Wang and his crew keep it going.
Sitting back under the red tent, Wang looks out at the crowd.
“Its remarkable how people seem here,” he said. “New Yorkers are usually grumpy, but here they are casually joyful.”
That feeling is what drives him to keep going.
“I hope the Queens Night Market exists in some shape or form for the next 10 years, but what’s most important to me is that there continues to be some such event that really prioritizes social impact, rather than just paying lip service to it,” he added.
A vendor at the Queens Night Market.Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach
12:30 a.m.
Just after midnight, the market closed and vendors packed up in a way that’s far more chaotic than the way they came in.
Cleaning up is generally easier, but exhaustion from the day makes it more of a daunting task.
“You work faster, because you want to go home,” said Guzman, while folding up tables.
It all came down just as easily as it went up – the tables, the tents, the lights. The bustling market at the crossroads of the world quickly returned to an empty lot outside of a science museum.
Until next week, when it will happen all over again.
