FEATURE
Photo courtesy of R. Friedman, We Buy Guitars, LLC
BIG APPLE
GUITAR SHOPS
Then and Now
By BoB CIANCI
A New Jersey native remembers Music Row’s early years
and checks in on NYC’s current indie guitar-shop
I wanted to be anywhere but my hometown
of Bloomfield, New Jersey, in the mid to late
’60s. Los Angeles would have been nice.
London would have been better. Most of the
bands I liked hailed from those cities.
One saving grace was that Bloomfield was only
a short ride from Manhattan, and from age 15
on, I regularly made trips into the city alone
when I had a few bucks in my pocket—
usually the day after Christmas. The bus ride was
$1.30 each way, and I managed to figure out
the subway system pretty easily. One of my
favorite hangouts—after eating at the Horn &
Hardart Automat and cruising 42nd Street to
gawk at the hookers, lowlifes, porno palaces,
and drug dealers—was West Greenwich Village.
Specifically, the area around Avenue of the
Americas, including Bleecker, MacDougal, and
4th streets. The Music Inn, importer of cool
English rock LPs and world music instruments,
was a definite stop every time, along with
Village Oldies and Matt Umanov’s repair shop. I
never went into Umanov’s, but I always enjoyed
pressing my nose against the window. I also
recall seeing Dan Armstrong’s repair facility.
After college, my new hangout in the Apple
was 48th Street—“Music Row,” the nerve
center of the musical instrument business in
Manhattan. I can’t imagine how many hours
I spent ogling the used and vintage guitars
in the windows of Stuyvesant Music (aka
“We Buy Guitars”), Alex Music, 48th Street
Custom Guitars, Rudy’s Music Stop, Terminal
Music, and, of course, the venerable Manny’s
Music. It was your classic “kid in a candy
store” scene. Like most young people, I had
very little money to spend on guitars, so my
time was mostly spent—you guessed it—
pressing my nose against the glass.
Stan Jay of the famous Mandolin Brothers
music shop in Staten Island remembers the
scene very well.
PREMIER GUITAR JUNE 2010 127
“Silver & Horland had a very nice store near
city hall and the Brooklyn Bridge, but they later
moved to 48th Street and, within a few years,
were gone. There was a guitar store named
for and run by Noah Wolfe. Harry West—a
private detective with an office on Park Place
where J&R Music is now—had, in his apartment in the Bronx, one of the finest collections
of acoustic instruments in the northeast. And
Marc Silber, who later moved to California, had
a shop in the Village. There were also buyers/
