In Monday’s (4/13) New York Times, Daniel J. Wakin writes, “A crossroads of maestros and tyros, the venerable Joseph Patelson Music House in Manhattan has been like a living room for the classical music world. For more than six decades its shelves bulged with the fruit of Mozart and Bach, Stravinsky and Strauss, to be plucked by shoppers who wore its wooden floors black and sought counsel from expert and sometimes cantankerous sales clerks. Yes, you know it is coming: Goodbye, Patelson’s. Marsha Patelson, the daughter-in-law of the founder, said she planned to close the store and sell its home, an 1879 carriage house that sits a baton’s throw across 56th Street from the Carnegie Hall stage door. It is falling victim to a transfigured world, in which the power of digital retail has made places like used bookshops, record stores and sheet-music dealers little more than quaint relics. … Ms. Patelson said the store had been losing money for years. … Ms. Patelson has no specific closing date, she said, but will shut the store by the end of April after selling off as much stock as she can.”
Posted April 13, 2009
