On Record Store Day, A Look At Old Haunts

Kim's Video & Music — Kim's Video and Music closed its location in New York's East Village in 2014. Google Streetview

When Cutler’s Records and Tapes in New Haven, Connecticut, closed after more than six decades in operation, the New Haven Register described its departure as “an inevitable sign of the times.” Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, who grew up in New Haven and stayed there to attend Yale University (2013), calls the shuttered store “a symbol of nostalgia.”

Although the vinyl format has experienced a resurgence -- one music executives still regard as a hipster “fad” -- retailers such as Amazon.com and Urban Outfitters are among those benefiting from it. In 2014, Jack White’s “Lazaretto” was the best-selling record, and it moved a mere 86,000 vinyl copies.

Should the resurgence persist, it’s clear that family stores such as Cutler’s will not be the ones to benefit. “[Cutler’s] captures the ’90s and my childhood and the death of tangible things,” says Nalebuff, who remembers buying her first CD there -- Britney Spears’ “Baby One More Time” (1999).

“This is a retirement celebration; it’s not sad. We’re still making money. We’re going out on top,” owner Phil Cutler told the New Haven Register in 2012.

Here’s what the storefront looked like in 2011:

Google Street View hasn’t taken a turn down the street in a while, but here’s a picture of the opening of a Barbour store -- a high-end British clothing purveyor -- at the same spot:

Yale students interviewed by the Yale Daily News decried the change in storefront amid the shifting of the downtown landscape toward a more elite consumer.

Nicolas Stavros Niarchos, who graduated from Yale in 2011 and is now a journalist in New York, remembers Cutler’s as the first store he ever patronized in New Haven. He’d go back again and again as a Yale Daily News music reviewer, until one day “I just walked around the corner, and it wasn’t there anymore.”

In one particularly memorable review, Niarchos wrote about The Fiery Furnaces’ album “Widow City” (2007) at the suggestion of Cutler’s staff after the album he’d meant to review hadn’t yet been released:

“Music has become too sterile with the advent of computers and, listened to in a couple of years, the album may be considered junk from the past. Soon, the dissonance of the album will be incomprehensible to a perfection-driven music market.”

Whether dissonance has been driven toward extinction in the ensuing years is up for debate, but the comfortable chaos of cluttered record-store aisles has certainly receded.

In honor of Record Store Day, here’s a nostalgic look at some of America’s shuttered record stores and what they’ve become:

1. Easy Street Records (Lower Queen Anne location) in Seattle

Before (2008)

After (2014)

2. Streetlight Records in San Francisco

Before (2013)

After (2015)

3. National Record Mart in Pittsburgh

Before (1940)