Dan Bingler took an abandoned Family Dollar in the Lower Ninth Ward and made it a shop where everything is free.

The building on the corner is covered in graffiti and looks shut. Twice a week the doors open and people walk out with clothes, mattresses, books, toys and food, and none of it costs anything. The concrete floor turned out to be good for roller skating, so there are skate nights as well.

20 September 2026

A graffiti-covered corner shop with red awnings, the words THE FREE STORE and NOW ACCEPTING DONATIONS painted across the shutters, and a woman walking out of the open door carrying bags — Number 5523, an old Family Dollar. The hand-painted sign lists the days donations are taken.
Photo: Catie Dull, via NPR

An abandoned Family Dollar store in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans has spent three years as a shop that gives everything away, and in the evenings people skate on its floor, NPR reported on Sunday.

More than twenty years after Hurricane Katrina the neighbourhood still has empty lots where houses were never rebuilt and storefronts that were boarded up and stayed that way, and the free store is one of them, a corner building covered in graffiti that looks closed from the street.

They see the graffiti on the outside of the building and it's a misconception. I say, go in, there's blessings in there, go in.Ernestine Lane, to NPR

Lane was there with a friend from church, trying on boots and winter clothes in the middle of August with the temperature near a hundred, because, she told NPR, people in New Orleans do not own cold weather clothes and when it does turn cold they have nothing.

A woman with a headscarf stands looking at four tall shelving units packed with books, with more paperwork stacked on top and clothes on a rack to the left — Four cases of books, and nobody pays for any of them.
Photo: Catie Dull, via NPR

The deal

Dan Bingler, who is 42 and founded the mutual-aid group that runs the store, the Greater New Orleans Caring Collective, has a history degree and used to work as a server and a bartender in fine dining restaurants. He was sent home when the pandemic started and began organising grocery deliveries for older people, meals for families and laundry runs for anyone who could not safely get to a laundromat, and he told NPR that it blew up locally.

When Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana in 2021 the group was left holding so many donated objects that it became a resource centre, and the parking lot outside the empty Family Dollar was already being used for handouts, so Bingler went to the owner of the building and made an arrangement: the group uses it rent-free and pays the utilities, and the building stays in use until the owner is ready to redevelop it.

The space is nine thousand square feet with no air conditioning, cooled in summer by a row of industrial fans.

People who are struggling don't just want the bare necessities. They want nice things, too, because they deserve nice things, too.Dan Bingler, to NPR

Two girls with braided hair lean together smiling in front of big plastic bins heaped with donated clothes — Angela and Gloria Calix, eight and nine, who were shopping with their stepmother.
Photo: Catie Dull, via NPR

What people take

Hilsa Rodriguez, 37, who has six children at home, was there with her stepdaughters Angela and Gloria Calix and her four-year-old. Angela picked out animal-print hair clips for school. Gloria was looking for baggy jeans and found a small furry vest, which she said she wanted to give to the baby her stepmother babysits, and she also took towels in case she went to the beach and a pair of flip flops that she was not sure would fit, because she has big feet.

Twice a week the store also opens for other things, which Bingler listed to NPR as free testing for sexually transmitted infections, food handouts and basic medical care, alongside art classes and free punk shows.

Two women on roller skates under pink and purple light in the open space of the store, one in a large furry hat, both laughing — Chrishana Simon and Diana Ledet on the store floor during free skate.
Photo: Catie Dull, via NPR

Skate night

Bingler told NPR the ground is perfect polished concrete, which is why there is skating at all, and the store keeps skates for people to borrow, which is how Chrishana Simon learned. She said it feels good on the wheels and the floor feels nice, and that she skates a good deal better than she pole dances, on the pole bolted to a table near the couches at the side of the room.

The next storm

Erin Sims, who was setting up a hot dog stand by the back door, has lived in the Lower Ninth Ward all her life and raised three children there, and her mother raised her and four siblings there before that. The only time she left was for Katrina, when the levees broke and her house went under, and it took her eighteen months to rebuild. She told NPR the neighbourhood never fully came back, that there are still abandoned places and that you cannot buy groceries or pick up medicine without leaving the area.

Bingler calls it the number one food desert in Louisiana, and says the point of the collective is to be closer and better prepared when the next storm comes, running relief and opening the building as a shelter if it is needed, even if what it can offer is skating on a generator.

A bearded man in a flat cap and a pale T-shirt standing in the dim interior of the store, shelves behind him — Dan Bingler, who thinks the same thing could be done with empty storefronts anywhere.
Photo: Catie Dull, via NPR

Phyllis Matthews, a retired social worker who volunteers at the store and goes by Queen, was sorting newly donated clothes and described her job as being all over the place, like an octopus. She is trying to find the store a truck, so it can go and collect the big things people want to give away.

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Written from the reporting of Debbie Elliott, with Eleana Tworek and Samantha Balaban, for NPR, 20 September 2026, heard on Weekend Edition Sunday. The photographs are by Catie Dull and were taken at the store in August.