Empty Tower Records -- how does it make you feel?

Are you talking about Poobah's, Gorge? (And are you a regular with a new name?)

I bike past the old Tower location in Lincoln Park nearly every day. It's not a real estate office. I really miss it because it was the only music store in the area that was open 'til midnight. When everything else was closed on Sunday evenings, it was comforting to be out for a run or ride and stop by Tower, browse the new releases and magazines, perhaps get an impulse purchase. I could be sitting at the computer at 11:00 on a Sunday night reading about some album on a music site or forum, and able to be at Tower within ten minutes to pick it up for total instant gratification. That softened the end-of-weekend blues just a bit, and was totally worth the extra $2-$5 I might pay over hunting for weeks for a cheap used copy or ordering online.

I assume the Tower that became Rasputin is in San Francisco? I'm jealous. That tiny-ass town has about ten times the square footage of record store space that Chicago has. That ain't right.

now a real estate office. I looked at a condo in that same building last year. The assessment was too high and it was too small, and it would have depressed me living there. Conversely, having a record store in your building could increase the risk of foreclosure, heh.

There is a Tower that became a Rasputins? It's not in SF. Maybe the one in Campbell?

SF's major claim to record store fame is Amoeba. If we didn't have that, we'd be in the same boat as any other town (without an Amoeba that is.)

"tiny-ass town" -- tee hee hee

yeah we also lost, what, 5 specialty shops in the past five years or so? Open Mind is the latest to (finally) catch the ax....

gone in recent years:

Rough Trade
Reckless
Mission Records
Compound (jungle/d&b)
Persimmon (used tunes in lower haight)
Spundae (progressive house/trance)
Tower (4 locations inc. the once-awesome tower outlet)
F8 (psytrance/rave)

i know i'm missing something

I think you are also forgetting how long it has really been since Rough Trade and Reckless closed, it must be 10 years by now.

Maybe the one your forgetting was Record Finder on Noe?

Oh there was also Rocket Records, I think that was the name, on 9th Avenue.

Record Finder closed in the last five or so years, yeah.

Is Flat Plastic Sound still around?

I worked at a Chicago reckless for a while, and I can recall getting loads of the SF store's inventory getting shipped over to us and added to the bins -- this was in 1999, so yeah, that one's been a while.

We said "getting" a lot in 1999, it was like the cool thing

I think Rough Trade in SF closed like, 15 years ago!

Yeah it feels like ages ago.

Reckless was post-Amoeba, but not long after. Early-mid 1999 sounds right to me.

i moved to San Francisco in 1995 and heard about a year later that Amoeba just bought that old bowling alley at the end of Height St. three records stores closed on that street all because of that move. still we got Amoeba and only Los Angeles can also say that.

never would call San Francisco a town it's 7 x 7 or 49 square miles but very much a City.

i need a edit button, Haight Street.

Uh Berkeley can also say that.

i guess i feel those closings - reckless and rough trade - were the very beginning of the fall. reckless was very much a product of amoeba's arrival, rough trade mismanaged their stores into the ground (there was one on haight st. which eventually moved south of market into a space that would be considered some of the most prime business space in the city right now - 3rd and Townsend, right across the st. from Tower Outlet). being at amoeba i work with people who worked at both places of course, it's the sort of place you end up if you ever worked in bay area record retail.

i meant in addition to the original, which came from Berkeley of course.

I forgot about the Rough Trade @ 3rd St. That's prime business space, but it's still kind of poor retail space.

Empty Tower Records = good label name

never would call San Francisco a town it's 7 x 7 or 49 square miles but very much a City.

I was joking about that. It's just smaller than Chicago. It's actually the 60th largest city in the world. Chicago is 29th just behind Bangkok, London 25th, Paris 22nd, L.A. 8th, Lagos 7th, Shanghai 6th, NYC 5th, Sáo Paulo 4th, Mumbai 3rd. Who knows the top two off the top of their head? I wonder how many record stores they have?

I love San Francisco. When I first visited in 1996, Rasputin was king. The Amoeba down the street had more used CDs, but the selection wasn't quite there. I vaguely remember Reckless and Rough Trade on Haight and wondered how they were still open. I'm glad Amoeba and Reckless in Chicago are showing that record stores can still be viable. You just can't get rich off it. But what independent retailers do? Does anyone have stories of new stores opening in the past year? I know of Permanent Records in Chicago, right by where the old Ajax used to be in the 90s.

Completely off topic, but how is Paris bigger than London?
Top two would be Tokyo and ummm Mexico City?

Righto. According to this Paris has 2 mil more people. http://www.worldatlas.com/citypops.htm

love the paris tower records...i bought a magma and really bad serge gainsbourg cd there

funny, I'd always learned/heard that London was the bigger of the two.

xpost: whoa there's a tower records in paris (or used to be i guess since this thread implies that they've closed down). Where was it?

Depends what you count as Paris and/or London.

Tower closed in London a few years ago now I think. I do kinda miss the Alternative/Punk (or whatever it was called) section as it was the best out of any of the major record stores I've ever been in. The Zavvi that replaced it is rubbish.