Brookline Record Stores: From Edison's Phonograph to Village Vinyl

In 2024, I sold my collection of a few hundred vinyl record albums to Jonathan Sandler of Village Vinyl & Hi-Fi in Coolidge Corner. They were mostly jazz albums I'd bought in the 1970s and 1980s, including quite a few older albums I'd picked up in used record bins during those pre-CD years.

The covers of the album, as well as the music on them, carried a lot of sentimental value for me. But I hadn't actually owned a turntable for years, and I was glad that, in addition to providing me some extra cash, the music would find new owners/listeners, especially amid a growing appreciation for vinyl.

I also gave Jonathan a printout of a 1955 Brookline Citizen ad for Rhythm Row, a record store in the exact same Harvard Street storefront to which he moved his then year-old shop -- originally in Brookline Village -- in 2018.

Brookline Citizen, January 5, 1955

307 Harvard Street is one of a row of single-story storefronts built just south of Babcock Street in 1928. Tenants over the years have included various restaurants and clothing shops. The Rhythm Row music shop was there for just a couple of years in the mid-1950s. 

(The 1955 ad highlighted a visit from noted jazz disc jockey "Symphony Sid" Torin. (One the albums I sold, by jazz singer King Pleasure, included a song -- "Jumpin' With Symphony Sid" -- with music by Lester Young and lyrics by Pleasure.)

The presence of two record shops in the same spot six decades apart is mere coincidence, one Jonathan had been unaware of. But it did set me off on a journey to learn about the history of music stores in Brookline, the subject of this extended post.

Edison and Sound Recording 

Thomas Edison's earliest work with sound recording caught the attention of Brookline. As early as 1878  the Brookline Chronicle carried a query from a reader asking "Can you tell me anything about the early life of Edison, the inventor of the phonograph?" By the late 1880s, Edison had moved from cylinder recordings to discs and the Brookline papers were paying attention.

In February 1889, a brief item in the Chronicle noted an entertainment at the Corey Hill home of Jerome Jones. "The subject," reported the paper, "was Edison's inventions, with both the phonograph and the gramophone instruments and an expert to demonstrate the marvelous power of them."

Newspapers, including Brookline papers, continued to report on Edison's technical innovations, and advertisements promoting commercial applications were not far behind. In December 1893, the Chronicle carried an ad from the New England Phonograph Company in Boston promoting their new device as an "ideal stenographer" but as also promising that 

"As a Christmas gift nothing can be purchased for the same amount of money that will begin to compare with the Edison Phonograph."

Brookline Chronicle, December 16, 1893 (Click ad for larger view)

The ad called the new device "The Triumph of the Age." In addition to using it for business, it said,

"You can entertain your friends the whole evening with selections of the best music. Overtures, Marches, Waltzes, Polkas, Light Operas, etc. by the most popular Bands and Orchestras of the Country besides Vocal, Instrumental, and Talking records."

 

Public Programs

There were examples noted in Brookline newspapers in the 1890s of public programs using the phonograph to present sermons, speeches, election returns, and music to live audiences in town. By the fall of 1899, it seemed the gramophone craze at had truly taken off in Brookline. 

See, for example, these notices in the local papers:

Brookline Chronicle, September 30, 1899

Brookline Suburban, October 26, 1899

 

Brookline Chronicle, December 9, 1899

Phonograph Sales Spread

Brookline papers also started advertising sales by Boston stores of phonographs or gramophones for home use, along with records to play on these new machines.

Brookline Chronicle, September 16, 1899

Brookline Chronicle, October 21, 1899

Brookline Chronicle, June 9, 1900

 

Prices of record players started to drop as manufacturers started to realize they could make bigger profits by selling more records if the cost of the machines to play them on came down. 

"It is confidently believed that this substantial price reduction will have the effect of placing gramophones...in the hands of thousands of persons who have hitherto been restrained from purchasing by reason of the comparatively high prices heretofore prevailing," reported the Chronicle. (June 30, 1900)

It was the same principle behind King C. Gillette's sales of razors at low cost with the real money to be made on repeated sales of razor blades. (Gillette, by the way, came up with this idea while living in Brookline in the same period. See that story in another of my blog posts.)

As early as 1903, one enterprising person took out an ad in the Chronicle offering for sale a phonograph with a collection of "about fifty records."

Brookline Chronicle, November 21, 1903

A little more than two years later, Henry Savage's real estate concern, with a branch in Coolidge Corner, advertised listening rooms "to hear and select your Phonograph Records."

Brookline Chronicle, January 27, 1906 (Click image for larger view)

"Under these new conditions selecting records becomes a pleasure," said the ad. "We sell every good make record and machine. Edison, Columbia Disc and Cylinder, Victor, and American Disc."

Henry Savage's real estate office stood at the southwest corner of Beacon and Harvard Streets. The building was later torn down and replaced with a new building at the same location. (Click image for a larger view.)   

Four years later, in 1910, Martin Barrett, who had a cigar store on Washington Street where it crosses over the train tracks in Brookline Village, advertised Edison phonographs for sale as a Christmas gift.

Brookline Press, December 24, 1910

Four years after that, the business, taken over by John J. Williams, gave equal prominence to cigars and phonographs in its listing in the 1914 town directory...

...while also hosting a record exchange that local people could take part in.

In 1915, a new store called the Brookline Talking Machine Shop opened at 1336 Beacon Street, in a new building called the Pierce Block, just west of the S.S. Pierce store. (That storefront is now home to a branch of the national-wide hair-cutting chain Supercuts.)

Brookline Townsman, July 10, 1915

The new business advertised the sale of both records and record players.

Click image for larger view

Local organizations, in Brookline and elsewhere, starting acquiring records and record players.

Brookline Chronicle, July 15, 1919

Brookline Chronicle, June 18, 1921

Brookline Chronicle, April 1, 1922

Brookline Record Stores

Recorded music may have made its first appearances in Brookline through special event announcements and ads from Boston-based music stores. But stores selling records soon began to appear in town.

In December 1922, a store called Kammler & Hamilton at 229 Washington Street in Brookline Village (the storefront is now the Shared Tea) was billing itself as "Brookline's Exclusive Music Store," offering "all the latest 'Hits' to select from."

Brookline Chronicle, December 12, 1922

Chester E. Kammler would run the Kammler Radio Company until his death in 1935. (His original partner, Hamilton, was with him for just the first year.) Born in 1892, the son of German immigrants, Kammler had worked for a Boston-based piano manufacturer before serving in the army in World War I.

Kammler would continue sell records, along with phonographs, sheet music, and other items in the same location for a little over a decade.

Brookline Chronicle, November 24, 1923

Brookline Chronicle, December 16, 1926

A 1932 Chronicle article -- "Kammler Music Company Celebrate Their Tenth Year Here" -- noted that 

"The phonograph is well represented through a complete stock of Victor, Columbia and Brunswick recordings of the latest dance music and vocal selections."

 

Chester Kammler died in November 1935. The store remained oven for a short time after his death, as seen in the ad below, but soon closed.

Brookline Chronicle, February 6, 1936

There were many more Brookline stores selling records over the next half-century, (See the end of this post for ads and articles about many of these.) But by the 1990s, cassettes and CDs had far overtaken LPs as the most popular format for recorded music, as seen in this chart produced by Recording Industry Association of America.

(Click image for larger view)

The rise of online music formats led to a further decline in all physical media. (According to one news account, more than three thousand record stores closed their doors in the United States between 2003 and 2008.)

The Vinyl Revival and Village Vinyl & Hi-Fi

The decline of vinyl records and record shops was closely followed in the mid-2000s by a movement that's been called the Vinyl Revival, And  Brookline's Vintage Vinyl & Hi-Fi, with which I began this post, is a successful part of the movement, as featured recently in the Boston Globe.

"This Coolidge Corner spot" wrote the Globe "is the place to find that record you never knew you needed until you got there."

Boston Globe, July 2025

Vintage Vinyl & Hi-Fi began in a basement storefront at 58A Harvard Street in Brookline Village in 2017.

Vintage Vinyl & Hi-Fi in its original Brookline Village basement location at 58A Harvard Street where it opened in 2017. (Image via Google Maps)

Jonathan Sandler in his original Brookline Village location at 58A Harvard Street in 2017

In 2018, Village Vinyl & Hi-Fi moved to its current location in Coolidge Corner. The store expanded in 2024, taking over the adjacent storefront formerly occupied by branches of flower and plant seller Kabloom and then Vom Fass, a German-based seller of gourmet olive oils and other food products.

Village Vinyl & Hi-Fi in 2020, before it expanded into the adjacent space previously occupied by Kabloom and then Vom Fass

Village Vinyl & Hi-Fi in 2025 after expanding into the adjacent storefront

Jonathan Sandler, center, with two other employees of Village Vinyl. (Brookline News photo by Sam Mintz accompanying audio profile of Village Vinyl.)

Brookline's Fisher Hill Reservoirs

Mention “the reservoir” to people in Brookline today and they will probably think of one of two bodies of water: the Chestnut Hill Reservoir or the Brookline Reservoir.

But the Chestnut Hill Reservoir is actually in the Boston part of Chestnut Hill, just over the Brookline border.  

And the much older Brookline Reservoir, while in Brookline, was built as part of Boston’s water supply, not Brookline's.

 

This presentation is not about those reservoirs, but about three other Brookline reservoirs, all on Fisher Hill. These reservoirs no longer exist as bodies of water, but they have left their mark on the landscape and the town.

The map below at left, a portion of an 1855 map of Brookline, shows Fisher Hill at center left, north of the Brookline Reservoir.  The map at right shows more or less the same location today.

 

The older map was made 11 years after the Brookline Reservoir was built as part of the system bringing water from Lake Cochituate through Brookline to Boston. 

The New York and Boston Railroad, introduced in 1845, runs through the low-lying valley in the center of the map, between Fisher Hill and Aspinwall Hill. 

That, today, is the route of the D branch of the Green Line.

Beacon Street, laid out as a narrow, unpaved country lane in the 1850s, is to the north.

A few streets have been laid out across Fisher Hill, though houses are still largely confined to the lower slopes and would remain so for another 30 years.

By 1874, when the view below (part of a larger map) was produced, Brookline was in the process of building its own reservoir on Fisher Hill to serve the town. 

A natural pond, shown in the circle in the center of this view, had been converted into an earthen basin to hold water that could flow through pipes from the high elevation of Fisher Hill to other parts of the town.

The water came from the Charles River, at the Dedham/West Roxbury border, four miles away.

“The Town of Brookline,” reported the Boston Globe, “is now actively engaged in laying down pipes, constructing reservoirs, and setting up the machinery for a supply of water from Charles River.” 

“The water is to be raised to an elevated point near the river….whence it will flow by its own gravity to the summit of Fisher's Hill…. 240 feet above tidewater.”

“From this point it is distributed through service pipes to the consumers.”

The pumping station in West Roxbury, shown below, was built on land owned by the Town of Brookline. It sent the Charles River water through through pipes up to Fisher Hill.

In 1888, the City of Boston built the Fisher Hill Reservoir, across Fisher Avenue from Brookline’s reservoir, as part of Boston’s own water supply

In 1893, Brookline added a second, smaller, covered reservoir to its own water system. It is under the dashed lines, marked “Brookline Water Works," between Fisher Avenue and the town’s older, open reservoir, on the map below.

The trade journal The Engineering Record presented sketches of the unusual covered reservoir. 

But to really get a sense what that looked like, here are underground photos from a few years ago, before a new development was built on the site of the long-unused covered reservoir.

 

By the time of the 1907 map below, the older, open reservoir of the Brookline Water Works had also been covered.

A brick house, owned by Josephine and Frederick Gay, had been built just north of the reservoirs.

This aerial view below, from 2025, shows new housing, outlined in pink, in the area once occupied by the Brookline reservoirs.

Fisher Hill Reservoir Park occupies the space of the former Boston reservoir.

The former Josephine and Frederick Gay house is now Mitton House, named for a later owner and now part of a new senior housing complex called The Newbury at Brookline.

The following views show some of the varied landscapes of today’s Fisher Hill Reservoir Park, opened in 2016…

...while some of the brickwork from the old town reservoir can be seen in the lawn of a new, town-built mixed-income housing development....

...along with an historical marker telling the history of the site.