After 58 years of flipping through crates and hunting for hidden gems, Fifth Avenue Record Shop in Park Slope has gone quiet. The longtime used vinyl, cassette and CD spot has closed, its storefront stripped and its interior gutted this week, closing the book on one of Brooklyn’s longest-running independent music shops.
Closure Reported by Local Outlets
SI Live reports that the shop shut its doors this week and that the space has been emptied out, describing the business as a neighborhood fixture dating back to the 1960s. The outlet notes that the closure effectively erases a familiar landmark from the block.
A brief write-up in Brooklyn Eagle echoes that sense of loss, saying the disappearance of the store leaves a noticeable gap along Fifth Avenue where the sign and stacks once drew in passersby.
Roots on Fifth Avenue
SI Live traces the store’s beginnings to 1966 and notes that it settled into its longtime spot between Eighth and Ninth streets in 1972. There, it built its reputation on racks of used records, CDs and tapes.
According to the same report, founder Tony Mignone eventually handed the business over to longtime employee Ryan Romanski, who kept it going for years as what SI Live described as a “labor of love.”
Rising Rents and Pandemic Slump
Reporting from SI Live points to the familiar one-two punch facing many small New York retailers: climbing commercial rents and a brutal pandemic-era slowdown. The outlet notes that the shop’s rent jumped from roughly $250 to more than $4,000 in 2014, a spike that would test any mom-and-pop, let alone a niche music store.
Reporters also recount how the business struggled to stay afloat after the pandemic, a pattern that has played out across the city as independent storefronts try to survive with thinner margins and shifting customer habits.
Neighbors Saw the End Coming
Locals had already started bracing for bad news. Neighborhood photographers and guides documented the stripped interior, and a Park Slope-focused photo blog posted images showing bare walls where shelves of records once stood. A neighborhood listings site now tags the business as closed.
For a visual goodbye, there is a Park Slope gallery on James and Karla Murray’s blog, while the updated listing at Corner quietly confirms what regulars on the block already knew.
A Larger Paradox for Vinyl Lovers
The timing stings a bit: industry reporting on RIAA’s year-end numbers shows U.S. vinyl revenue hit roughly $1 billion in 2025, a sign that plenty of listeners still want to drop a needle on an actual record. The problem, as this closure underlines, is that a healthy appetite for physical music does not always translate into sustainable storefront economics.
For many Park Slope shoppers, the Fifth Avenue shop was the kind of place you wandered into “just to look” and walked out from with an album you did not know you needed. Regulars say they will miss that sort of accidental discovery. It is not yet clear whether the landlord has lined up a new tenant or whether the store’s collection will surface somewhere else, and there had been no public statement from the operators as of this report.
