Flaming Pablum: Exhuming St. Marks Sounds

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Exhuming St. Marks Sounds

Back in 2015, after having weepily documented the long, slow demise of storied record shop, Bleecker Bob’s at 118 West 3rd Street, I posted an entry about myself and my friend Steve having lunch at Miyabi, the Japanese restaurant that had assumed the long-contested address on West 3rd. Late last year, however, Miyabi quietly closed without a great deal of fanfare. I’m not suggesting there’s any sort of cause-&-effect correlation there, but it happened anyway. As I type this, 118 West 3rd Street is back to being a dormant, vacant space.

I’m not saying the same thing’s going to happen this time, but … we’ll see.

I’ve written here about St. Marks Sounds -- or, to some, simply Sounds -- a bunch of times (see list below), but it was a longtime mainstay of St. Marks Place – well, actually, that’s a rather myopic declaration. St. Marks Place has gone through a wide series of iterations over its evolution (and devolution) in the course of its many decades (and I recommend Ada Calhoun’s excellent “St Marks is Dead,” if you’re curious about that history), so to assert that one single shop was a “mainstay” is a bit over-the-top. Certainly for folks of my era, it was a long-standing destination in the middle of the block between Third and Second Avenues wherein a veritable nation of New Yorkers procured their vinyl and, later, compact discs, but to suggest that it was anything more than that is probably just fancifully subjective projection.

Regardless, to myself and my similarly inclined gaggle of friends, it was a fairly crucial establishment. Up a sweeping stoop and behind a tall, heavy door was a high-ceilinged chamber filled with records, tapes and discs of all description. The walls were covered with posters (which they never parted with, much to my pronounced chagrin) and music was always blasting (although still not as loudly as at Freebeing Records down the block and around the corner on Second Avenue, where the volume was always excruciating).

Anyway, as time went by and things started to sharply change on St. Marks Place, Sounds stayed put … invariably because the guys who ran the place also owned the building [ADDENDUM - not true, it turns out...check out the comments]. In fairly short order, Sounds became the only the place to buy music on St. Marks (following the inevitable demise of ventures like Venus Records, Rocket Scientist and the magisterial Mondo Kim’s). Sounds held out the longest.

But, in 2015, St. Marks Sounds joined the ranks of those other shops — and other neighborhood hold-outs like the re-located-to-First-Avenue Mondo Kim’s, Birdman’s Rainbow Music on First Avenue, Norman’s Sound + Vision on Third Avenue, Other Music on East 4th, which shut up a shop a year after Sounds — and closed its doors. For a list of shops that *are* still there, click here … before another one vanishes.

Rumors swirled about what was to become of both the St. Marks Sounds space and the also-shuttered Grassroots Tavern beneath (which I wrote about here). There was chatter that the endearingly ramshackle Grassroots was going to turn into an exclusively bespoke bistro, but that evidently fell through, and it’s now a ridiculous doggie daycare endeavor called Manhattan Pawffice.

The space that had been St. Marks Sounds for so many years eventually turned into a hairstylists’ operation called MG Hair Artistic Salon, who evidently specialize in Asian-centric hairstyles. I stopped in today to check it out. They were very friendly, but very confused about my explanation of why I’d stopped in, but they let me snap a few pics anyway.

THE BIG ROOM THEN..