TIMES ARE A CHANGING.....

Somewhere in it's mish-mash of urban planning, it was decided that
Broadway take a diagonal line from the center of Manhattan into The
Boulevard at the planned sight of a memorial to Christopher Columbus.

Along the way the street would diagonally cross other North-South
avenues. The places would be called "squares" even though they were
triangles or traffic circles. They would get their names after
something important in the area.

The New York Times moved it's headquarters during this period from
what was known as Printing House Square, where all but a few
newspapers were located, downtown near City Hall to this former
farming area at 42nd street. And so the triangular islands there
became known as "Times Square".

The Times outgrew and moved out of the building by the 1960's and the
building was converted to general office space and stores. It was in a
basement area that had been turned into a mini shopping mall subway
passengers would pass by on their way to and from the BMT line where
Slim rented space. Using the simplest naming convention, Slim simply
called the store Times Square Records for no other reason than that he
was in the Times building located on Times Square. These became the
glory days of the Times Sq. Record Shop and the Alan Fredrick’s and
later Slim's "Times Square Records Shop" radio shows.

Urban renewal being inevitable the Times building was going to be raised
and slim had to find a new location. He found it a block to the east
at 42nd and 6th Ave. in another subway entrance shopping area. The
Times Square Records name stayed, it was the legal name and had the
reputation behind it. The radio station WADO changed format to all
Spanish and so even the show, now hosted by Slim was relegated to the
then unknown FM radio band as it moved to WHBI. WHBI had no studios
in New York at the time, it had been a part time AM station sharing
Sundays with WADO. In order to stay in business, it took one of the
last FM allocations available in the area and now had to fill a lot
more time. Slim actually produced the show from a makeshift studio in
the backroom of the store.

As time went on the music and he times changed there was really no
money in the old record business anymore. The radio show was gone and
the store moved across the hall to a smaller location. Slim
eventually sold the store to collector Louis Silvani. Here ends
Irving "Slim" Rosensweig's affiliation with R&B music.

Sometime around 1973 a collector, Bob Ostrowski, told me that he had
run into Slim in the financial district. He was working in retail
on Nassau Street. I remembered that there was such a place
a few doors down from a bar a buddy of mine hung out at, but when I
went to check it was out of business. About a year later I learned
there was another adult place directly across from City Hall
in a building where I was familiar with the location.
A hardware store occupied the main
store and there were two doors to the left of the main store. One led
upstairs to a Pool Hall I frequented, the other to a tiny back room
adult store. It wasn't until after the building was closed
up and was about to be renovated and become part of J&R Music World
that someone mentioned that Slim worked there too.

- The Store Continues -

With the oldies revival coming on there were many an attempt at an
oldies magazine and Lou Silvani began to advertise for mail order.
Eventually keeping the store going got to be too expensive so he
closed it down and moved the business to his apartment in the Bronx.
He later opened a store in Hasting-on-Hudson, NY, but that was closed
a few years ago and Lou Silvani now runs Times as a Mail Order site on the internet.

It wasn't that long after Lou Silvani closed the 42nd Street store that Nick
De Krechewo passed the empty place and thought he would try to get
another oldies store going at the location, along with partner Roy
Adams, a part time DJ on WLNG and WHBI. They tried to reopen it as
"Times" but a title search found that Lou Silvani was still using the name.
They chose "Downstairs Records" as the name of the new store.

It was the hey day of the oldies revival in the early 70's so the store
did well, eventually moving across the hall to Slim's first location
in the mall and then with the onset of Disco Music it took over the
adjacent store and tore the wall down for a major expansion.

Roy left Downstairs to start his own store, Arcade Records in Queens,
but it folded after a year or so. We understand he moved to Florida
where he became gainfully employed in radio management.

In the same ironic way that Slim had to move out of the Times building
and no longer be "Times Square Records" on Times Square, Downstairs had
to move as well. First it was a street level store on 43rd Street in the
back of the old Sterns Department Store building. The city owned the
building and it eventually became part of the City University who
wanted the space for the University. Downstairs again moved across the
street but this time upstairs to a 3rd floor loft. After a decade
there it took office space in a building on 6th Avenue around 37th St.
for a while.
Today Nick has the store in Copiague, Long Island.

Steve Coletti
New York

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