We recently found a stash of photos from the 2002 Friends School Plant Sale, when the sale was still held at the Friends School building. Most of these were taken from the roof of the building, and you can see the line stretching down the block. You can also see the straw we used to spread on the grass to protect it, which didn't really work.
All of the tables in this photo (on the east side of the school, Horton Park in the background) are sitting on land owned by the city of St. Paul's public housing, rather than by Friends School. So we were killing their grass every year.
Boxes were handed out from the white popup tent at the corner of Albert and Englewood.
The shoppers entered through the center sidewalk, and the RV parked on the street served coffee, cookies, and our then-famous Rice Krispies bars (made in a home kitchen... so much for food safety!).
Here's the line from the entrance. It went around the block.
Finally, we opened the "door" at 11:00 a.m. back in those days, and everyone flooded in at once.
This was before we had the tie-dyed T-shirts. Volunteers wore these yellow shirts with the old Plant Sale logo on them. The tie-dye shirts were an innovation the same year we moved to the State Fair Grandstand (2005) so we would be able to find each other in the huge space!