FROM THE HERALD NEWS (North Jersey Media Group)
Sunday, November 12, 2006
By MEREDITH MANDELL
HERALD NEWS
PASSAIC -- For some, it was the day the music died when Record City closed on Halloween night. And on Thursday, when the Blue Castle was sold, patrons mourned the passing of the eatery's bite-sized burgers.
Both businesses had been members of the downtown business community for nearly 50 years. The closures not only reflect the end of a chapter in the city's history, but also a telling economic and demographic trend of businesses not keeping pace with the developing Latino market.
Close to 70 percent of the city's population of 68,422 -- about 47,196 residents – are Hispanic, according to the 2005 American Community Survey. The largest single group is Mexican, who number 21,885. The survey showed that the majority of Hispanic residents speak Spanish as their primary language at home.
Many retail stores and restaurants in the city will have to find different marketing strategies or they will fall victim to supply and demand in courting the large influx of Hispanics, particularly from Mexico, who have the power to determine what's on the "hot" list, local business leaders said.
"People from different countries look for stores that cater to their tastes," Passaic Urban Enterprise Zone Board member Flora Palacios explained in Spanish. "People want salsa music. They are forgetting about hamburgers and want tacos, fajitas or things that are healthier, like beans and rice."
Record City, which opened in 1958 as a concession, was known as a boutique record store that specialized in R&B, soul, Motown and disco. People would come from New York to find rare LPs, and many famous black artists, including Run-D.M.C., MC Lyte, C+C Music Factory and Blue Magic, visited the store at 4 Lexington Ave. It was a place where the city's youth would come and spend their afternoons to escape the teeming urban streets.
"It has been a stepping-stone for many employees throughout the years," said Malaki Martin, a former Record City employee who through his job connected with Fatman Scoop and is now the rapper's personal assistant.
But many of the store's clientele moved away and the tastes of Passaic have changed over the past 15 years. The shop's co-owner, Joseph Hunter, 49, of Passaic, said Latino customers preferred to frequent stores that specialized in the music of their country. For a time, the store tried to sell Mexican rap music to the influx of Mexican immigrants, but interest waned.
"They buy in their own stores," he said of the changing musical tastes.
The city's demographic shifts, along with the larger social trend of downloading music from the Internet, made it hard to justify operating the store. Hunter and his two partners,brother Andre, 48, and John Dent, 64, decided to shut down and consolidate operations at their Paterson store on Main Street, where they have a larger customer base.
The Blue Castle shared a similar economic fate of declining clientele. While owner James "Jimmy" Francis Donnelly decided to close his door due to poor health, his daughter, Kelly Chomyszak, said the small luncheonette at 533 Main Ave. had also experienced a significant erosion of business over the years.
She said she was too busy, as a mother of two, to keep the business going. The Blue Castle opened in 1944 during the city's industrial heyday as a small 24-hour luncheonette that served up coffee to factory and railroad workers on the night shift.
Inside, there were porcelain walls and dark blue vinyl stools that gave familiar comfort, regular customers said. The intimate lunch counter fostered a special social atmosphere where letter carriers and city workers ate lunch and argued about the Yankees, football and politics.
"They solved the problems of the world over a cup of coffee," said Chomyszak, who waitressed at the Blue Castle as a teenager with her sister, Bonnie. Now she and her father worry about where people will go to dine and engage in the banter of the day.