A Few Blocks Off: The Geography of Record Stores
Walk to, between, or around record stores and you’ll almost certainly see something interesting.
Where the hell am I? Of all the neighborhoods in this city, how did I end up in this one? And how do I get back to my hotel?
These are questions I often ask myself when I’m in a city I’ve never been in. My favorite thing to do when I go to an unknown city is wander aimlessly. For hours. Like the more-seasoned and better-known wanderer here at Record Lung, I’ve dedicated countless steps to roaming random neighborhoods in cities, edge cities, suburbs, and exurbs across the country. I’ve gotten to see some extraordinary places, but the extraordinaryness isn’t the point. Walking around mid-sized American cities often presents you with unassuming and interchangeable blocks, stretches of storefronts and business parks, quiet streets with nothing obviously noteworthy about them. Georges Perec spoke of the “infra-ordinary”: the everyday, habitual things we usually overlook because they seem too banal to matter, but are where most life actually happens.
This infra-ordinary is what I’m in it for. I’m an urban planner, trained in the tradition of everyday urbanism and inspired by the work of J. B. Jackson, who wrote so perceptively about the ordinary landscapes most people overlook. Making good plans for places requires deep knowledge of those places. Where do people live? How do they get around? Where are there opportunities for redevelopment? Walking around is one of the best ways to gain insight into these questions.
I’m also a teacher; sometimes these wanderings are in service of whatever class I’m teaching. When I taught a class about highway removal, I wandered up and down highway corridors. I even taught a class about wandering itself. The Dadaists used to pick random points on a map and travel to those points, letting chance dictate what they would find. There’s also the older tradition of the flâneur, the urban drifter who has no purpose other than to observe and absorb the rhythms of the street. French Surrealists invented aimless “deambulations” to jam urban logic. Later, the Situationists formalized the dérive, a kind of urban drift in which you let the emotional contours of the city guide you, following attractions, repulsions, and atmospheres rather than any fixed plan. Then there are more performative modes, like Vito Acconci’s Following Piece, where wandering becomes a kind of rule-based act, part game, part art.
So what does this have to do with records? In my experience, the best wanderings start by walking to, between, and around record stores. Record stores, it turns out, are gateways to the unseen parts of cities, rarely located in the obvious places. As low-margin businesses in need of cheap rent, they tend not to be on the main tourist drag, at the convention center, or in the neighborhood where your Airbnb is. In my experience, they’re more often a few blocks off, or even a few neighborhoods over. And many of them are in highly diverse areas, centers of immigrant and refugee life.
In Buffalo, New York, for instance, I recently walked from my downtown hotel to Black Dots, and then to Revolver Records. The route to Black Dots took me up Niagara Street, a long, uneven corridor with wide lanes, mostly auto-oriented businesses, and remnants of a heavier, industrial past. Immigrants and refugees have been steadily transforming it, filling in storefronts, opening small businesses, and layering new cultural identities onto an older physical fabric that wasn’t built for them but is being adapted in real time.
Then I walked up to the West Side Bazaar, a food incubator that feels like a kind of anchor along the corridor. Inside, it’s a dense collection of small, immigrant- and refugee-run food stalls flanking a food court, with options spanning Burmese, Ethiopian, Sudanese, Mexican, and more. You can sample a dozen geographies in a single room there, each one tied to a story of Buffalo’s demographic transformation.
From there, I headed east through a residential neighborhood of quiet blocks of closely spaced houses until I hit Grant Street, where Black Dots is. It’s one of the most diverse stretches of the city, where immigrant and refugee families have put down roots and where that presence is immediately visible in the storefronts. Businesses from around the world line the corridor, including grocery stores, restaurants, salons, and shops, each one signaling a different community and adding to the density of the street.
Buffalo was one of several cities I’ve explored on recent trips, many with a similar story. In the magical, criminally overlooked city of Utica, Off-Center Records is located directly across from The Center, the city’s main refugee resettlement hub. Utica is one of the most cosmopolitan small cities in the country, a place where roughly one in four residents is a refugee. This diversity is immediately visible from Off-Center’s storefront, from which you can see a steady flow of new Americans coming in and out for language classes, job training, and other services. Take a walk around the surrounding neighborhood and you’ll see storefronts and religious structures reflecting dozens of nationalities, a streetscape shaped by the intersection of recent arrivals and the city’s older urban fabric.
In Albany, NY, Last Vestige on Quail Street is also in a neighborhood that has seen waves of immigration and refugee resettlement. A walk from the Empire State Plaza to Last Vestige will take you through “Little Afghanistan,” where roughly 1,000–1,500 Afghan refugees have resettled in recent years, adding to Albany’s long-standing role as a refugee reception city that has welcomed people from more than 80 countries over the past few decades. Along Central Avenue, that history is immediately visible in the Afghan bakeries and restaurants alongside West African markets, Yemeni cafés, Caribbean takeout spots, and longstanding Latin American and Asian businesses. It’s a corridor where the city’s global connections are on full display and where you can move from one geography to another in the span of a few blocks.
Places don’t have to be immigrant and refugee hubs to be interesting. Record stores tend to cluster in a particular kind of urban condition: affordable, accessible, dusty, culturally active, and just outside the spotlight. Walk around pretty much any record store and you’ll be sucked into the infra-ordinary, into neighborhoods that weren’t curated for visitors but are clearly central to how the city actually works. Commercial strips in transition. Older corridors hold on as new businesses pop up in overlooked spaces.
Walk around Ugly Mike Records in Little Rock, Arkansas, and you’ll see a utilitarian commercial strip with an overly wide road, fast traffic, a mix of aging storefronts and everyday businesses that is less a destination than a piece of the city’s working fabric.
A stroll around Mobile Records on South Sage Avenue in Mobile, Alabama, takes you through the kind of dusty, low-slung, brick-dense landscape of early postwar retail and light industrial uses that is so ubiquitous in southern cities.
Longhair Records and Charley’s Records and CDs in Albuquerque, New Mexico, puts you in a mid-century grid of motels, strip malls, and international businesses along Central and Menaul, remnants of Route 66 layered with newer immigrant-owned shops that give the area a lived-in feel.
Around Renaissance Records in Birmingham, Alabama, the setting is a more walkable, student-adjacent neighborhood near Five Points South, where older buildings, bars, and small shops create a denser, more continuous street life.
Trolley Stop Record Shop in Oklahoma City, OK, sits in a transitional area just north of downtown, where historic structures, empty lots, and incremental reinvestment all sit side by side.
Around Shangri-La Records, in Memphis, Tennessee, you’re in Midtown, where older residential streets meet a lively commercial strip of tattoo shops, bars, restaurants, and music venues that has a layered, slightly gritty energy that feels tied to the city’s musical identity.
And near Record Exchange in the Southampton neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri, the pattern shifts again: a compact, hyper-local commercial strip along Hampton Avenue, with a mix of long-standing neighborhood businesses and newer arrivals, all embedded within a residential fabric that feels steady, lived-in, and distinctly St. Louis. (The shop is also a modernist architectural marvel, built in 1961 and located in the former Buder Branch of the St. Louis Public Library.)
In Phoenix, Arizona, attempts to wander around places like Stinkweeds and Tracks in Wax proved mostly futile, not for lack of interesting surroundings, but because the distances, the heat, and the sheer hostility of the pedestrian environment make walking really suck. But that’s an urban planning rant for another time.
These walks aren’t curated or exceptional; they’re just a random cross-section of where I’ve ended up over the past year. But they don’t have to be remarkable to matter. In fact, that’s the point. As John R. Stilgoe wrote, “outside lies magic,” pretty much wherever outside is.
Hunting for records never happens in a vacuum; it’s a real-world, physical experience of people and places, an invitation to explore and … wander. And the records themselves, the ones in the used bins anyway, often reflect the social and cultural layers of the surrounding city and its residents. So pick a store. Go there. Walk around. Get lost. Be a flaneur. Deambulate. Dérive.
Oh, and ask the record store if it does shipping so you don’t break your back along the way.
This is the best thing yet on the Lung. You're a great writer and I'm grateful to know you.
Great stuff. I'd add that in a complicated/income-all-over-the-place city, the used record stores (and thrift stores) vary in their personality and inventory as much as their neighborhoods do. Records I've scooped from the $2 or $0 bin in the business district's tourist-oriented, Record-Store-Day-observing shop have got me $5 or $15 or (in a memorable instance) $175 of trade value at a shop a few dozen blocks and eight sociocultural zones away. Everybody wins!