[78-L] Manhattan's Colony Music to close after 64 years

[Cary Ginell]

I first visited Colony Music at Broadway & 49th Street in 1978, at the height of the disco invasion. While the Bee Gees' "Night Fever" streamed endlessly over their sidewalk speaker system, I browsed inside for rare LPs and sheet music. I remember buying "Ranch House Favorites" by Bob Wills on MGM there - overpriced at $30, but still a treasure. One of the few instances where a 12-inch LP was rarer than its 10-inch equivalent (I learned that the tracks were different, even though the artwork was the same; my 12-inch copy had 1954 performances on it, while the 10-inch had most earlier stuff from 1947-50). Thirty years later, I got the thrill of seeing songbooks that I produced gracing their Broadway-facing front window . Their used LPs had been relegated to the basement and I never got to go down there to browse because it was always gated off with no one willing to open up. Colony should have closed long ago because they couldn't afford to be competitive with the internet, but it's the last vestige of the glory of what Times Square used to represent.
 
http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2012/08/colony-music.html
 
Cary Ginell