Park Blvd Records, the only specialty rap and hip-hop store in Oakland, known for its rare and eclectic selection of cassettes and vinyl, will close its storefront at 2014 Park Blvd. on June 16.

The company announced the move on Instagram and Twitter on Thursday, May 30: “So much has changed in the four short years since we opened — in rap music and in record collecting, in The Town and in the world — that our already stubborn mission of running a highly specialized neighborhood music store has started to feel like a full on fool’s errand.”

The store’s owner, Andrew Nosnitsky — who goes by Noz — told The Chronicle on Thursday that the shop had not been working on a number of levels, and that the decision to close the physical space had been a long time coming.

“I’m shocked that we’ve been able to do it for four years,” Nosnitsky said. “Every step of the way, it seems like it’s been such a struggle. It’s just been a lot. The shop has always been a labor of love.”

Nosnitsky, who moved to Oakland from Washington, D.C., in 2011, opened the record shop in 2015 with Jason Darrah, a rap blogger who sold albums online. Both of them were ardent collectors, and opening a store felt like a logical next step. Darrah left the business in 2017, but the store had already earned a reputation as the premier resource for rap and hip-hop collectors in the Bay Area.

“I’ve been buying records since I was 10 years old,” Nosnitsky told The Chronicle in 2017. “Eventually, your apartment fills up and you have to figure out what to do with them.”

There was no shortage of customers — though having more wouldn’t have hurt, Nosnitsky said — and the store’s landlord had been accommodating with the rent. Instead, one of the biggest factors in Nosnitsky’s decision to close the store was that it has become a struggle to get the right records because of the store’s ultra-specialized style. Aside from the variety of rap and hip-hop albums that were organized by region, the store also had a large collection of house, electronic, ambient, rock and R&B offerings.

The store’s online shop will also close temporarily, but will reopen later in the summer. Nosnitsky said moving out of the physical space is his main focus at the moment. He added that he is still processing his thoughts about closing the store.

“It’s been a good experience,” he said. “I’m glad that I did it. I’m glad that it could exist, especially for younger people who’ve never been to a store that’s filled with rap records. I don’t know, maybe it will inspire some people.”

The news of Park Blvd’s closing came just a day after Second Line Vinyl, a West Oakland record pressing plant, announced that it was going out of business. Just two years ago, Second Line Vinyl said it planned to build a recording studio and venue alongside the plant — the first in Oakland since the 1930s. That move was initially reported by KQED Arts.

Champion Sound Records, a specialty record shop for soul and dancehall music in Oakland, was priced out of its space and closed in January.

In February, Reid’s Records, California’s oldest record shop and one of the oldest African American businesses in the Bay Area, said it would close its South Berkeley shop in the fall.

Nosnitsky said in January that it is a tenuous time to be running an independent record store, and expressed concern over the “bougiefication” and lack of connectivity within vinyl culture that he’d noticed on the retail side of vinyl collecting.

“Still thanks are due to all of you who understood and appreciated what we were trying to do, who always came through and showed us love,” Nosnitsky wrote in the statement. “We will love you in kind forever.”

Related articles

Reid’s Records in Berkeley singing its swan song after nearly 75 years

SF reissue label Dark Entries gives lost, forgotten music another spin