By GRIFFIN LIMERICK
Photo credit: Griffin Limerick
Red Onion Records owner Josh Harkavy didn’t listen to vinyl much growing up. A native of Long Island, N.Y., Harkavy said his earliest experiences with music came secondhand from his older sister — Pixies, Nirvana (she would play “Nevermind” a lot), garage rock and grunge — all on CDs and cassettes.
“Records, not so much,” Harkavy said. “I feel like they were going out of style mid-’90s, late-’90s for sure.”
Harkavy is soft-spoken, like a foil to the music that plays in the background — John Prine giving way to Ornette Coleman and free jazz. His store Red Onion, on Gallatin Street, is in its third (and he believes final) iteration, having climbed its way out of the original basement location that Harkavy opened in D.C., back in 2006, right on the precipice of the 2008 vinyl boom.
The Hyattsville space is all sunlight and potted plants, green murals on pallid walls, white wooden record crates and bookshelves, a big bay window. Harkavy stands in the shadows toward the back, pricing vinyl on top of a glass display case and spinning records that he takes from the showroom floor and then returns once they’ve made their trip around the sun. (Although Harkavy has DJ’d at places like the Black Cat and Rhizome in the past, he doesn’t consider himself a professional: “I think ‘DJing’ is just another way of saying ‘playing records,’” he quips. “If you have good records, you can be a DJ.”)
Harkavy has about 10,000 more records in reserve, waiting to be priced and displayed. They live on shelves in the partitioned back of the store — a private, mirrored inversion of the public front that Harkavy hopes to one day empty and transform into a live music space to accompany the small stage he keeps by the entrance. The reserve records serve as a kind of hourglass that will determine when Harkavy’s (and Red Onion’s) time is up, as they make their way, album by album, sleeve by sleeve, from the back of the store to the front.
“I’m not going anywhere until I get rid of all my stuff,” Harkavy said. “So I’m here for a while, hopefully.”
Personal history
Where does a life in music begin? Surely in youth — the post-Raffi years, when teenagers seeking a soundtrack for their emotions find agency in their song selection for the first time and an entire catalogue of music history from which to choose. For Harkavy, who spent his teenage years on Long Island reading music magazines and newspapers at his self-proclaimed boyhood Mecca — Tower Records — his vocation in music began in college, though not in the traditional sense.
As a child, he’d seen his parents play records around the house (“They weren’t crazy into music”) and had admired the packaging, but when he moved to New Brunswick, N.J., to attend Rutgers University in the late ‘90s, still listening to his music on a Walkman, he lugged only a small crate of records with him. It was in New Brunswick, at a record convention, where Harkavy says he “got the bug.”
He started venturing into nearby New York City to buy records for the first time. When he left New Brunswick two years later, after studying “nothing” — “I studied socializing and experimenting with stuff” — the crate had turned into several boxes, which, over the next few years of haunting estate sales around Long Island, would turn into a moving truckload of 20,000. The truck would turn into Red Onion. Harkavy drove it to D.C. in 2006 with his wife, Alyssa, after she landed a job in the District.
The two had met a few years earlier at the MACROCK music festival in northern Virginia. The District-based post-hardcore band Fugazi was headlining. Harkavy said he and Alyssa “kept bumping into each other,” and that they went on mini dates while there, between shows. Before departing from the festival, they exchanged email addresses.
“I still have all those old emails,” Harkavy said. “It’s really sweet.” A friend bought them a poster from the festival as a wedding gift.
In the ensuing years, while Alyssa attended grad school in New Brunswick, Harkavy got his education working at record stores in the area, most notably the Princeton Record Exchange in Princeton, N.J., where he learned about different pressings and conditions.
At Princeton, Harkavy also got a sense of scale. “I’m sure they made millions of dollars a year,” he said, speaking of the Exchange. Harkavy wanted something more modest — “just a little spot with some records and some books, some CDs.” He would find it in a basement on T Street
The business
2006 was a strange year to open a record store. Tower Records franchises were closing all across the country. The company had filed for bankruptcy and liquidation. Everything was on clearance. According to Harkavy, those in the industry thought the future was digital: The days of physical media were over.
“That was a weird feeling, to be like, ‘OK, I’m going to open a store,’” Harkavy said. “But what I was doing was way different. [The other stores] were mostly CDs at that point. I was like, ‘I’ve got tens of thousands of used records. There’s no way I can’t make money off this stuff.’”
He chose the basement at 18th and T streets because the rent was affordable and he could walk to it from his home in Mount Pleasant. In his own words, Harkavy knew it was doable — there were other record stores in nearby neighborhoods. The move ended up being a fortuitous one. Between 2006, when Red Onion opened, and 2008, when the housing market crashed, record companies started releasing mass-market vinyl pressings of contemporary bands for the first time in decades. A new generation of record-heads started thumbing through the old stuff, as well. For the first time since 1982, when they’d begun their free-fall, LP sales were on the rise. Rather than being behind the times, stores like Red Onion were avant-garde.
“Clearly I got there at the right time,” Harkavy said. “Those first five years were like hotcakes. We’d have Record Store Day back in the early days, and we’d have a line around the corner.
“I would say there definitely was a peak for us, 2008 to 2011.”
The store was so successful that, three years after opening in D.C., in 2009, Harkavy and his wife were able to buy a house in Hyattsville — a little craftsman bungalow on Kennedy Street. Like records, however, retail is cyclical.
“The business is random things that come in at a random time,” Harkavy said. “You get customers who don’t know what they’re looking for, or might be looking for something that you have or don’t have. There are so many factors. And if you’re not comfortable with the ups and downs, you’re going to go crazy.”
Immediately after the peak years, in 2012, Harkavy announced that he was shuttering Red Onion for good. He even went so far as to send an email announcement to his customers, thanking them for their patronage. Washington City Paper ran the announcement like an obituary. In an interview with The Washington Post in 2022, Harkavy chalked it up to an “existential crisis.”
“When you work somewhere else, you get a steady paycheck; you don’t have to think about the other elements of running a business,” Harkavy said. “But when you’re the one who’s in charge, it’s a lot of pressure.”
But the record-heads protested. Vinyl is a clunky, physical manifestation of an otherwise ephemeral medium. Customers wanted a brick-and-mortar location, not a flea market pop-up or a mail-order service, as Harkavy had proposed. The outcry was, in Harkavy’s words, “really sweet.” He decided that maybe he just needed to change up something every couple of years — the inventory, the layout, the location. In 2015, he moved the store to U Street — “a nice, above-ground location.” Then, four years later, he moved again — this time, home to Hyattsville.
“I figure, we live here; this spot is great; let’s just get out of D.C.,” Harkavy said. “I didn’t really feel the need to have a store there and have a store here, so I was just like, ‘Smell you later.’”
Hyattsville
Harkavy didn’t shop around for his Hyattsville location. The first and only place he looked at was 4208 Gallatin Street — Mike Franklin’s former toy warehouse and office, out of which Franklin mailed his orders. The Independent Order of Odd Fellows owned the building, and rent was cheap. Everything seemed fated.
At first, Harkavy used the space for storage, as well, while continuing to operate out of his U Street storefront. Then, in 2018, as he was preparing to transition Red Onion permanently to Gallatin Street, tragedy struck. A pipe from the Odd Fellows lodge above burst. Half of the store flooded, roughly from where the cash register now stands to the middle of the showroom floor.
“Just a little $2 plastic gasket,” Harkavy said, “a toilet, or something. It was Thanksgiving. It was a nightmare.”
He found the wreckage in the morning. He threw out “thousands and thousands” of records. Books. Neighbors who have now become friends stopped by to help with the cleanup. Harkavy refused to take it as an omen.
“I didn’t let it discourage me,” Harkavy said. “Now I can barely even remember what we lost. I had some time to put it in perspective.”
Like the early days in D.C., Red Onion in Hyattsville has seen its booms and busts. A fruitful first year in 2019 gave way to the 2020 pandemic business slump. Two years of renovations to Robert J. King Memorial Park, which is located across the street, also hurt his foot traffic. But Harkavay says he has enjoyed an entirely different clientele in Prince George’s County than he had in the District.
“Every week, new people come in,” he said. “It’s a great feeling.”
He still hosts live events. Local bands have played out front on the sidewalk for the past three years of the Hyattsville Porchfest. Recently, on May 3, he even held a cat adoption on the showroom floor.
Harkavy doesn’t attend estate sales anymore. The days of finding a stack of rare psychedelic records at a house in Long Island are over. Mostly, the records come to him. He’s a stickler for album condition. As he moves the records from the back of the store to the front, Harkavy checks the corners, looks for rips and tears, searches for mold — though he admits that you can get a great record for much cheaper if the packaging isn’t in great shape. “You’re not playing the cover,” he says.
Records are still 90% of his sales, though he’s noticed a trend towards CDs in the younger generation.
“I’m fascinated by the teenagers and CDs,” he said. “I think they’re getting it from their parents most likely, and I love it.”
Asked if Hyattsvillians have any specific tastes, he says no, that it’s “thankfully everything.” He admits that Red Onion isn’t the biggest store, so he has to make sure it’s well-curated, with “a little bit of something for everybody.”
“That’s the great thing about a record shop,” he said. “You can sell anything to the right person.”