Here's a really quick one. I know I spend inordinate amounts of time waxing rhapsodic about old, iconic downtown record shops that have gone missing in recent decades, but as I mentioned in this windy post of a few years back, those places weren't the only places I patronized. Once upon a time, there were records shops literally all over Manhattan. It's hard to fathom now, but back in the 70s, 80s and 90's, music shopping was still about tactile software. If you had to go get a compact disc today that wasn't a brand new release and absolutely had to have it by this afternoon, where would you go? You might be shit out of luck. It wasn't always this way.
In any case, below is a photograph I spied on Etsy of an old record shop whose doors I used to darken on Fifth Avenue between 36th and 37th streets. Don't bother looking for it, it's long, long gone. There's a big fuckoff hotel where it used to stand today, alas.
It wasn't the greatest shop in the world, but I remember buying several heavy metal albums there back in the day. As you can see from the shot, it had remarkably high ceilings, and they covered the walls with records.... which must have been something of a bitch for the shop assistants if you needed to fetch a high-perched one. I remember first spotting the album cover of Prince's Dirty Mind there and sniffing derisively.
A block to the south of this spot was another record store called Record Explosion which had a superior selection, but I still blew plenty of cash in both joints. There was also Record Hunter on the north side of 42nd and Fifth (which is now a cultural center for the Chabad Lubavitch) and a totally great record store on Madison between 43rd and 44th. Needless to say, all of those places are gone.
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