Bleecker Bobs is closing.

What a great, if crushingly sad, article - thanks for linking it, Ned.

"I think every record store these days is in jeopardy of being priced out of its neighborhood," says Josh Madell, co-owner of Other Music, an indie-centric East Village record store. "To me, one of the biggest things about that store is maybe they were focused on music that wasn't as popular now as when it started. That was a great punk store, and in the punk era, it was the only place to get a lot of stuff. It would be disingenuous to say I'm going to miss Bleecker Bob's. I literally probably haven't been there since I was in high school. But I hate to see what was a very cool store disappear."

are people supposed to stay in business forever? i get the real estate part of it though. nyc = expensive. got that.

maybe if they had worked the coffee mug/t-shirt angle harder...just as a brand you'd think you could stay in business. online store for bleeker bobs fashion. that sorta thing.

which was the lower manhattan store that specialized in doo-wop that closed in the lats few years?

And because Bob was open-minded enough to embrace emerging musical trends, rather than focusing solely on oldies, the store found itself at the forefront of the punk-rock explosion.

"And because Bob was open-minded enough to embrace emerging musical trends, rather than focusing solely on oldies, the store found itself at the forefront of [focusing for most of the past 30 years on oldies]."

This really highlights the paradox of rock magazines. Some point in the past looks continuously like the present to them. This makes them incapable of seeing oldies as oldies, or letting go of the past (ironically, exactly what the punk explosion they venerate represented: a violent letting-go of the past), which appears to them to be the present. They really believe they've found a way to freeze that yoghurt for good.

Not sure which doo-wop place you mean.

Just realized that Village Oldies is not the same as House of Oldies, which apparently is still there:

http://peterbengtson.smugmug.com/The-Village-We-Lived-In/Village-Oldies-Record-Store/11431644_3nxP8S#!i=1551111033&k=BxGHSHV

maybe if they had worked the coffee mug/t-shirt angle harder...just as a brand you'd think you could stay in business. online store for bleeker bobs fashion. that sorta thing.
― scott seward, Wednesday, April 24, 2013 5:44 PM

So no yogurt place after all?

Nor yoghurt. Nor record store.