Sea Hive: Remember when shopping was fun

San Diego’s best antique store isn’t really an antique store — at least, not of the old school variety, the sort of place where the merchandise consists mostly of Victorian dressers, cane-back rocking chairs, Depression-era glassware, and rusty old washboards. Sea Hive Station, in the heart of the city of San Diego’s stunning Liberty Station hub, is an eclectic marketplace that might be described as something Disneyland’s designers would have come up with had they been tasked with re-designing — reimagining, really — the traditional antique malls that were so popular in the waning years of the Twentieth Century.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, the 23,000-square-foot indoor mall — whose 150-plus vendors occupy one of the former Naval Training Center’s biggest buildings — was abuzz with shoppers. A young girl with extra-long lashes and a pierced belly button peeking out from below a white crop top was browsing through a rack of vintage vinyl LPs by such classic rock artists as Aerosmith, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Supertramp. Her mom, meanwhile, was picking up several bags of freshly ground coffee from the adjacent stall. A few aisles over, a pair of teen girls were rifling through a rack of vintage clothing — ‘70s velvet, floral blouses of the kind seen in virtually every ‘60s sitcom, ultra low-rise jeans from the early aughts — while their friends were scouring a display of vintage costume jewelry. And over on the far end of the cavernous building, an older couple — he with a pot belly barely contained by a gaudy Hawaiian shirt, she pudgy, with short gray hair and a sour expression as she chastised him for walking too slowly — were headed toward a booth filled with National Park T-shirts and placards and, oddly out of place, a vintage framed sketch of John F. Kennedy.

Sea Hive Station is not so much an antique mall as it is a collection of, well, cool shit. A Royal typewriter from the ‘20s; a pair of rotary phones from the ‘60s. Bags of pumpkin-flavored popcorn and natural dog treats. Pez candy dispensers. Ceramic planters. And, my personal favorite: a booth labeled “Magical Mystery Stores,” with custom clocks fashioned from vinyl LPs and 45s, tie-dye T-shirts, a ‘60s portable record player from Sears, and even a rusty metal Kiss lunchbox.

This fondness for mixing old and new, weird and weirder, is the secret to Sea Hive’s success, owner Brandon Vega told the Reader last year in a story on the disappearance of traditional antique stores and malls. He began his venture in 2017 in Oceanside, in a 13,000-square-foot building that used to house a Harley-Davidson motorcycle dealership. The Liberty Station Sea Hive opened four years later in 2021, and Vega has since opened two others: one in Mission Valley and one in La Jolla. Still, Sea Hive Station is not just the biggest but, arguably, the most popular. And, given the fact that it has more vendors than any of the others, it has the widest variety of merchandise. Dealers are handpicked along with their wares, everything carefully curated so there’s not too little of this or too much of that.

“No matter whether you are a grandma and grandpa walking in with your grandkids, a young couple, or a single 18-year-old, you should find something to pique your interest,” Vega said.