Seen in the Neighborhood

What a time to be alive! It was reported recently that for the first time since the late 1970s vinyl records will outsell CDs. How cool, I remember thinking. But I don't own a record player, and while I listened to CDs in my old car, my new car isn't equipped, and if not for a Christmas present for Cass (a boombox, baby!) we wouldn't have a CD player around either.

In our building there used to be a comic shop. Pour some out for Atomic Basement. After Mike shut it down in moved The Cypher on Elm, a clothing and skaters-sundry store. They moved out and in moved the instigation for this piece: Foot Work Records.

I made up a little diagram to illustrate this phenomenon:

Checking the legend makes this point clear. We live at the star, and in our building is Foot Work Records:

They weren't open today, or at least in the early afternoon. Now, if we walk up Elm we find the next closest little circle, the yellow record from the legend, a tiny spot called the Record Box (sorry, link's Instagram only):

Walking up Elm to 4th and turning right, we get to the largest spot in the quartet, Long Beach icon Fingerprints:

The furthest record spot on the map, Bagatelle's, is just across Atlantic from us, and is about 1000 feet away:

It's an institution in the downtown community and was old when we moved here 13 years ago.

How cool is it that within a rectangle that makes up just over 3% of a square mile (sounds weird, but I calculated it) there are four different independent record sellers? Pretty cool...I'm sure, even if records aren't one of my compulsions...

(My assistant on my photo recon mission gets herself in a few of the pictures above...)