I made it by the recently demised Tower Records Sunset store a number of times over the past couple of days, and was able to snag some photos. Other than the malfunctioning digital sign, the whitewashed album posters, the empty parking lot and the locked up doors, the building looked pretty much as it has for as long as I’ve known about it. That might sound like a lot of changes, but it really wasn’t. The red and yellow paint and the Tower Records logos had not been touched, so the casual passer by probably never noticed any differences whatsoever. The state of this place was really surprising to me though, as the SF Castro Tower Records shop right near home was immediately transformed into a faceless shell as soon as that store shut down for good.
I imagine that this will be the last time I lay eyes on this building looking like this. Who knows what’s going to go into this space, but I have a feeling that whatever does is going to involve razing and rebuilding. People in this country are too quick to destroy the old and replace it with a “bigger and better” new, and given the prime West Hollywood location of this site, that will probably be no different here. The kids of today and tomorrow could probably care less… what the hell was a record store anyways?
