Rough Trade has opened a second, 4,000-square-foot location under 30 Rockefeller Plaza, aptly dubbed Rough Trade Below.
Photo: Courtesy Tishman Speyer
Just down a stairwell past the Tonight Show entrance at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, behind the wide-open golden doors of Rough Trade Below, a Sam Fender track buzzed from the speakers while Mark Ellinger, in town from Montreal to chaperone a high-school field trip, looked through a box of used vinyl. “I’ve got students I have to meet up with at an Applebee’s in an hour,” he told me on a Wednesday evening after the record-store chain’s soft opening of its new, expanded space. “I was thinking, What the hell am I going to do near Times Square?” Nearby, a Polish filmmaker dug for a deep-cut Shriekback LP before heading around the corner to Radio City to see Barry Manilow. “A very American thing to do,” he said.
Having moved nearly four years ago from a 15,000-square-foot warehouse in Williamsburg to a street-level cubbyhole on the side of 30 Rock, Rough Trade finally has some room to spread out in the Art Deco complex. The subterranean location, occupying a 4,000-square-foot space that previously housed a Paper Source and a Hallmark store, triples Rough Trade’s midtown footprint. In addition to featuring a slew of titles from the 33⅓ book series, Godzilla action figures, and thousands of new and used vinyl records, the space — dubbed Rough Trade Below (the original street-level location is now Rough Trade Above) — houses a dedicated stage area and can accommodate nearly 300 people for live performances. Manilow could, conceivably, play here next.
Rough Trade’s second midtown location can hold nearly 300 people for in-store shows and other artist events — roughly quadruple the capacity of its street-level counterpart.
Photo: Courtesy Tishman Speyer
Rough Trade was lured to Manhattan by Tishman Speyer with what co-owner Stephen Godfroy called a “sweetheart deal.” It worked out: In its first year, the store’s sales “eclipsed” those of its Williamsburg flagship, and it has seen “double-digit growth” every year since, despite working with a fraction of the square footage, per Godfroy. “It’s definitely a kind of mutually beneficial arrangement,” he says. The store’s annual free outdoor iNDIEPLAZA concert festival — which takes place this Saturday, April 12, Record Store Day — brought 89,000 people to Rockefeller Plaza in 2024.
Odd pairing or not (the Ramones, Blondie, and Sonic Youth all recorded at Radio City Music Hall studios in their respective heydays), the record chain’s second midtown store will let more people see live performances — a hard thing to be mad at. “Having a store like that in New York is important, and they’ve done a great job of it,” says Secretly Distribution’s director of artist and label strategy, Josh Madell, who co-owned the late, great Other Music. “It brings an energy to that block,” which he characterized as essentially “a very expensive mall.”
Which could describe, well, much of the city right now. (Williamsburg nowadays looks more like Rockefeller Center’s fancy-retail twin.) And people just seem happy to support a brick-and-mortar with a well-curated record selection. “Seeing something cool that’s thriving, that’s cool,” says Fernanda Pavez, who stopped by on her way home from work to look for the new Lucy Dacus record. “Hopefully, it sticks.”
The new store features a slew of A24 merchandise, including soundtrack records and related book titles.
Photo: Courtesy Tishman Speyer
Jared Caponi, who browsed the new Rough Trade store on Wednesday before seeing a Broadway show, wasn’t completely sold on the aesthetic: “This has the vibe of a Tower Records, but the image feels a little manufactured.”
Photo: Courtesy Tishman Speyer