Tune Up: Manhattan’s Record Stores
In many ways, Manhattan Sideways is about the new: the new small businesses popping up on every corner and the owners making innovative strides in customer service, technology, and more. In popular culture, New York is often depicted as a city charging into the future, full of entrepreneurs and dreamers; a place to, as Frank Sinatra famously vowed, “make a brand new start of it.” In a city so inextricably associated with growth and change, is there any place for the past?
The owners of Manhattan’s record stores say yes. Amidst a whirlwind of ever-growing smartphones and Pokemon-ridden virtual realities, these store owners are working to preserve a once widely spread, and still widely loved, medium of music: the record.
The first record stores appeared in the late 1890s as early purveyors of phonographs, cylinders, and shellac discs. Other shops followed their leads, adapting their inventories to the advent of the shellac record, followed by vinyl records, before falling out of mainstream favor in the 1990s with the explosion of the CD and, soon after, the Internet. Today, with the world’s canon of music a URL and a click away, New Yorkers still flock to these stores to browse through albums new and old. Much like bookstores and libraries, independent record stores are known to have a certain aura: light, but dynamic background music, a slight smell of must, the low hum of small talk, and passionate staff with an unparalleled knowledge of music. There is something about the atmosphere that keeps us coming back.
In a speech given on the now internationally celebrated Record Store Day, Paul McCartney said, “When I recently played Amoeba in LA, I realized what fantastic memories such a collection of music brings back when you see it all in one place.” As the Millennial generation takes the helm, it will be up to them to nurture and keep preserving these memories.
In the meantime, visit these side street record shops for a slice of history.
