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.)

Spring Walking Tours of Brookline History

This spring's series of Brookline history walking tours kicks off this Sunday at 9 am with 165 Years of Shopping in Coolidge Corner.

Coolidge & Brother Store, 1887

Coolidge Corner was home to just one store—Coolidge & Brother—from the 1850s to the 1890s. Following the widening of Beacon Street in 1887-88 and the arrival of the S.S. Pierce store a few years later, a major new shopping district took root. Almost all of the existing buildings in this still thriving commercial area were built between 1890 and 1930. 

Join me for a journey back to the initial development of the Coolidge Corner business district and get a glimpse of local shopping in the early decades of the 20th Century. The tour is free, but registration is required. Register at https://bit.ly/coolidgecorner04132025 . 

The tour will begin at the Coolidge Corner inbound T-stop on Beacon Street. For a full list of spring tours, see the Brookline Historical Society website at https://brooklinehistoricalsociety.org/

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream!

I'm always going down rabbit holes, never knowing where any one thread of Brookline history is going to take me. 

My latest expedition began with a recent article by Celeste Alcalay in Brookline News about Jamie's Ice Cream Co., a small business that was added to the Brothers & Sisters café on Station Street in 2022. 

Brookline News photo by Molly Potter.

I'd done some digging into Brookline's ice cream history before, after the 2013 closing of Sealey's Lunch, which began as Sealey's Ice Cream on Cypress Street in 1936. You can read about that in my original post and a later follow up.

But little did I know how long, rich, and flavorful was the history of ice cream in town.

Ice Cream of All Sorts and Flavors

As early as 1870, ice cream was for sale in the "new dining rooms" at J. Anson Guild's Guild Block at the intersection of Washington and Boylston Streets. (The building was later replaced by the Brookline Bank building, now the NETA marijuana dispensary.)

The Guild Block, left in an 1872 photo, and an 1870 Brookline Transcript advertisement featuring ice cream at one of the businesses in the block. (Click image for larger view.)

Five years later, George Perkins advertised his "dining & ice cream rooms" with "ice cream constantly on hand" in the new Colonnade Block between Station Street and Andem Place.

The first two buildings of the Colonnade Block, still standing today, are shown in the 1874 photograph at left. The third building, where the Brookline Village Post Office is today, was built in 1875, the year the advertisement at right appeared in the Brookline Chronicle. (Click image for larger view.)

The bill of fare at the café, wrote the Boston Globe in October 1875, "is served in a manner that would put some of our first-class cafés all in the shade."

"Mr. Perkins," said the paper, "will continue to cater for private parties as usual, and the parties can be supplied with ice cream of all sorts and flavors, in large and small quantities, at short notice."

Other Brookline businesses -- including restaurants and retail food shops -- also included ice cream in their offerings in subsequent decades. 

(Click image for larger view.)

The "Quick-Freeze" and A New Ice Cream Era

But the real boom in ice cream -- not just in Brookline, but everywhere -- came in the 1930s, spurred by a new, faster, cheaper, more consistent ice cream making process.  (Clarence Vogt's patent for "An Apparatus for Manufacturing Ice Cream and the Like" was awarded in October 1929.)

In May 1931, the H.P Hood & Sons creamery announced that their first store using Vogt's new "quick-freeze" process would be opened in Coolidge Corner. "Quick-freezing," reported the Brookline Chronicle

"has wrought marvels in preserving the natural flavor and texture of several staple food products and applied to the manufacture of ice cream it has brought astonishing results in the improvement of quality by giving greater smoothness and richness."

 

The H.P Hood store at 1300 Beacon Street is shown here in 1936, four years after it opened. The space is now occupied by Coolidge Coolidge Corner Wines & Liquors

In the spring of 1932, another new business, "presenting for the first time [according to the Chronicle] a new idea in the field of merchandising ice cream," opened at 326 Harvard Street.

Named simply the Ice Cream Shop, it was the first in Brookline to sell only ice cream. (Hood's sold all kinds of dairy products.)  "As nothing else is handled," reported the paper, "a remarkable product is made and this is sold at an unusual price."

Brookline Chronicle, September 1932. The Ice Cream Shop occupied the space that is now Cold Brew.

Also opening in the spring of 1932 was a branch of Brigham's ice cream and confectionary store on Beacon Street at the corner of Williston Road. (The space is now occupied by the Sanela hair salon, next door to the Barcelona wine bar and tapas restaurant.)

Brookline Chronicle, January 26, 1933

Sealey's Ice Cream began its long run in Brookline in June of 1936. Six months later and two miles west on Boylston Street, Brookline's first Howard Johnson's restaurant -- as noted for its 28 flavors of ice cream as for its food -- opened  in Chestnut Hill near the border with Newton. (A second Brookline HoJo's opened in Coolidge Corner in the 1950s.)

Brookline Chronicle, December 12, 1936. The Chestnut Hill building, greatly modified, is now occupied by the Charles Schwab investment firm.

The Modern Pied Piper: The Good Humor Truck

Children lining up at the Good Humor truck, as seen in a 1932 advertisement

Howard Johnson and Sealey's were not the only ice cream newcomers in 1936 Brookline. That year also saw the introduction of Good Humor ice cream trucks to New England. Their base of operation? A large garage on Dummer Street just south of Commonwealth Avenue. 

Good Humor ice cream had started in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1923. Thirteen years later, its Massachusetts operation began with a fleet of refrigerated trucks that left the Brookline garage each day to sell the ice cream on a stick treat all over the streets of the Boston area.

"Each morning," reported the Brookline Chronicle, "the 40 little trucks are ammonia-ized and ice cream-ized, & off they go all over Metropolitan Boston to put people into good humor, but more important, to put Good Humor into people."

 

76 Dummer Street today

Good Humor trucks no longer operate, though the ice cream brand is still distributed through stores. And ice cream, introduced to Brookline more than 150 years ago, is as popular as ever in town today.

The New Coolidge Corner Theatre

Brookline Chronicle, April 21, 1923
(Click image for larger view)

The Coolidge Corner Theatre, a Brookline treasure for more than 90 years, had a grand opening and ribbon cutting of its newly expanded and revised spaces this week. But did you know that Brookline fought for 20 years against having a movie theater in town before the Coolidge finally opened in 1933?

Read about the struggle to bring a movie theater to town in this this two-part blog post from 2009:

• The Movies Come to Brookline -- At Last! Part 1   |   Part 2 

March 26, 2024

Harvard Street, Coolidge Corner: 1912 & 1937

Two of the busiest periods of commercial development in Coolidge Corner took place in the 1910s and 1920s. Perhaps no two photographs demonstrates this change better than these two images of the same stretch of Harvard Street, one from c1912 and the other from 1937.

West side of Harvard Street
between Beacon Street and Babcock Street (offscreen to the left), c 1912
Postcard view (Click on this and all images for larger views)

Same view, 1937
Photo courtesy of Brookline Preservation Department

The tower of the S.S. Pierce Building at the northwest corner of Harvard and Beacon Streets, constructed in 1898, anchors both images at the far left. (The open-deck tower was damaged in a storm in 1944 and replaced with the current closed tower.) But everything else in the picture has changed by the time of the later photo.

The building immediately to the north of S.S. Pierce is the same in both photos, but has undergone a change of design and of use by 1937.  Built as the Beacon Universalist Church in 1906, it was converted to the Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline's first movie house, just four years before the later photo was taken.

S.S. Pierce Building and Beacon Universalist Church, c1906

  

S.S. Pierce Building and Coolidge Corner Theatre, 1937 and 1970s

But the biggest change is north of the church/theater building, where four wood-frame houses have been replaced with commercial buildings.The difference can be seen in the segments of the two photos below and in the maps from the 1913 and 1927 town atlases. (The purple rectangles indicate the location of the buildings in the photos.)

Closer view of this stretch of Harvard Street

1913 atlas view
(Yellow buildings are wood-frame structures; pink buildings are brick.)

1927 atlas view

The Coolidge Corner retail district was expanding in all directions in this period; on both sides of Harvard Street north and south of Beacon Street and on Beacon east and west of Harvard.

All four houses in the c1912 photo had been replaced by commercial buildings by the mid-1920s. Houses north of these were also replaced by commercial buildings, including the Coolidge Corner Arcade, just visible at the far right of the 1937 photo. (The house it replaced is just outside the frame of the earlier photo.)

Even before being replaced, some of these and other houses on Harvard Street were put to new uses. The house at 302 Harvard, for example, became a boarding house, lunchroom, and cooking school run by a German immigrant named Martha Albinsky. Her daughter, Gertrude (Albinsky) Millett, wrote about it in the Brookline Chronicle half a century later and included a photo of her mother in her kitchen. (1976 article, at bottom of linked page.)

Ad from 1918 and 1920 photo from 1976 article both from the digitized newspaper collection of the Public LIbrary of Brookline

"The house my mother rented [wrote Millett in 1976] was very suitable to our purpose. It had been used as a party house by Rose Gordon and the large front room was ideal for a public dining room while the rest of the house could be used for boarders...But my mother's desire was to have a real dining room with homecooked meals for it was easy enough for her to cook for five or 20..."

"The homecooked dinner consisting of soup, main course, dessert, tea or coffee was 50 cents, and everyone enjoyed it, particularly the fresh-baked Parker House rolls which were my mother's specialty."

"The dining room was a success from the start, serving anywhere from 10-15 customers every night."

Houses across the street were also put to new uses before being replaced by retail buildings. The house at 299 Harvard became the Coolidge Corner Branch of the Brookline Library, while the house next to it at 303 became a funeral home. Both of these can be seen in the full version of the c1912 photo below. (Streetcar tracks are also gone, while cars are parked at the curb in front of the 1937 stores.)

Full postcard view of Harvard Street looking south from near Babcock Street, c1912
(Click for larger view)

Today, only two former houses (not counting the colonial Edward Devotion House) remain on Harvard Street north of Beacon; one, at the corner of Williams Street, is used for dental and other offices, and the other, at the corner of Kenwood Street, is now the Chabad Center. The buildings that replaced other houses on Harvard Street north of Beacon continue to thrive as part of the Coolidge Corner and JFK Crossing retail districts.