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October 17, 2006
Tower Records, Matchmaker
After 46 years, Tower Records has been sold to a liquidator who will shut the chain down. I've been browsing, even buying, at Tower since the first New York store opened at 4th Street and Broadway in New York in 1982. I even had a Desert Island Disks letter published in 1983.
More than music, my most visceral connection is Tower's critical role in my marriage. Here's how it happened:
I was browsing the Tower store at 67th Street and Broadway in New York in July 1987. I looked up and saw walking along Broadway a woman named Ruth Shereff.I knew Ruth, vaguely, from the National Writers Union, so I dashed outside to say hello. We walked, talked, and parted. About a week later she called to invite me to a party she was having, with some other writers, at her apartment in Morningside Heights.
I agreed. One of the other writers she invited, deliberately, was a woman she thought I would connect with. This woman ultimately wasn't able to attend that party, but I managed to find our her identity from Ruth. It turned out I also knew her from the NWU. I called her, magic happened, and two years later that other writer and I were married. We're no longer together, but that's another matter.
Ruth, sadly, died of cancer, but she lived to attend our wedding at Brooklyn's Kane Street Synagogue, Rebbe Debbie officiating. I'm very grateful that Ruth was there.
So, the closing of Tower hits me on a personal level. I always made a direct connection from Tower to Ruth to chuppah. Another link in the mystical chain is broken. All I can say to Russ Solomon and the team that put Tower on the Upper West Side: Thanks for the memories and the match.
Van | 10/17/06 at 06:51 AM | Categories: Sensual pleasures
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Comments
Yeah, I was bummed that Tower Records is closing too. But they sort of brought it on themselves. The founder insisted until the end that brick and mortar stores weren't being negatively affected by online music sales. They also kept on opening new retail locations even though their profits were dropping drastically.
Fern R | October 17, 2006 02:52 PM
Tower was a big part of growing up in the Bay Area. We'd drive twenty miles to go to the Berkeley store, or even into San Francisco to go to the big store at Columbus & Bay. They had records you couldn't buy anywhere else...classic soul LPs reissued in Japan, British punk rock records...and local bands that the other stores wouldn't stock. I'll miss 'em.
DRaftervoi | October 18, 2006 10:31 AM
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