Just a quick one.
I’ve spoken about the place before (notably here and here), but NYCD was this great, little shop on the Upper West Side that really had no business being as great as it was. Perched on Amsterdam Avenue between 80th and 81st streets, it was a well-presented hive of scrupulous music-geekery that probably would’ve been better suited to downtown. The staff was gamely chatty, gracious and knowledgable, and the stock was immaculately presented and robustly esoteric. It was perfect.
While never an Upper West Sider myself, NYCD was a regular stop for me throughout its tenure there in the 90s. As the unlikely pitcher of TIME Magazine’s softball team between 1994 and 2005, I was routinely found at the bar across the street from NYCD, that being McAleer’s Pub, where we’d repair after our weekly exploits on the softball diamonds of Central Park. After the inevitable few pints, I’d then pop across the road in a sweaty, beery frenzy, and blow large amounts on pricey imports. It was delightful.
I’m not quite sure of the chronology, but NYCD moved from that spot to a basement-level space one block to the north in the early 2000’s. One or two of the original NYCD dudes, meanwhile, had originally run a shop on St. Marks Place with the same aesthetic called SMASH CDs, which later merged with — or was taken over — by Rockit Scientist, who’d originally had a great space on Carmine Street.
Here in 2018, all those places are gone. The original NYCD on Amsterdam across from McAleer’s Pub is now a lobster take-out joint. The secondary NYCD basement-level shop is now a testing center for grade-schoolers having trouble with math and science. The space that was SMASH CDs and then Rockit Scientist on St. Marks is now either a boutique burger place or a bubble tea joint. They come and go so quickly, it’s hard to tell.
Anyway, here’s to the old NYCD.
Recent Comments