Sixty Years of Survival in Greenwich Village
Jeff Slatnick is the owner of the Music Inn on West 4th in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. First opened in 1958, the store has survived the Village’s transition from a cheap, hippy-filled neighborhood to one of the priciest pockets of New York City. The Music Inn’s endurance, however, is not the result of some elaborate business plan but the product of laissez-faire capitalism and simply “letting things unfold,” as Slatnick puts it.
But “letting things unfold” shouldn’t be mistaken for passiveness. Rather, it appears, a proxy for the winning combination of historical relevance, quirky ownership, and servicing a self-made community that all explain the store’s survival. That and the fact that the landlord hasn’t upped the rent in years.
Walking into the Music Inn feels like discovering a time capsule, hidden amongst shops that didn’t exist back when Greenwich Village was frequented by the likes of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. The Village was “a place for arts and crafts during that time,” says Slatnick, as he leans against a shop wall covered in sheet music, all immortalized through seventies decoupage.
There was the guy at the corner of Jones Street that handmade Greek sandals: “a whole shop, just for these Greek sandals,” exclaims Slatnick, eager to illustrate just how artsy-fartsy the Village had been.
But before the Music Inn existed, musicians would have to traipse up to 48th Street just to replace their guitar strings. So when it opened, the shop naturally became a gathering place for residents of the Village. Especially because the Music Inn sold records, which was the only way people could access new music back then.
“It’s not like you’d come here to get the new Beyoncé album now,” Slatnick says. “The neighborhood has changed,” he pauses, “and the store has changed.” But not to the extent that it has abandoned its roots.
Upstairs boxes of records still line the tables, organized by type and price. Guitars and other world instruments, many from India, hang by the dozens from the ceiling. There is a rusty, old cash register — still put to good use — that sits beside the chess board, setup on a makeshift cork table. Downstairs, the basement’s dusty, cement floors house countless percussion instruments, strings-upon-strings of Indian bells, an old piano, and half-a-dozen mismatched kitchen chairs.
“I suppose we’re a visage of the old civilization,” Slatnick contends, explaining how the store itself has this “continuity of history” that attracts customers today, both new and returning. He tilts his head to listen to the voices upstairs. They belong to a Dutch couple, who have been in the store for over forty-five minutes.
“They’re still here?” he whispers, raising his eyebrows in both surprise and appreciation. He pauses, “I bet they haven’t bought anything though.”
People’s fascination with the Music Inn doesn’t often convert to sales. “We’re kind of a fringe shop,” Statnick says, and people often come looking for something in particular. Otherwise, they just come to look.
The sea of ‘world instruments’ isn’t the only draw for locals and tourists, it is also clear that people come to chat with Slatnick himself. His particular brand of quirky makes him seem effortlessly authentic, eerily philosophical, and aggressively relaxed, if not a little odd.
He’s not a salesman, nor a manager. He’s a musician.
“The store was not my primary objective at all. I was just interested in playing music.”
Perhaps this is why the Music Inn’s staying power — especially in a gentrified Greenwich Village — seems so unexpected because, as even Slatnick admits, he “can be accused to being too lax, too lenient, allowing too much to happen.” But he says he isn’t passive about the business.
“Trying to not worry about money and at the same time being able to make sure that every month the bills are paid,” he says, “it’s not easy.” In fact, “it’s really hard.”
Slatnick says his suicidal nature helps him deal with the anxiety of running the Music Inn. “It gets pretty tight some months,” he admits, and “I just say to myself, if we can’t make it this month… well, then, that’s it.”
But the music is still playing. Every Thursday night at 9 PM, in fact.
The Music Inn has hosted an ‘open mic’ night every week for the past three years. It serves to unite what has become a community of dedicated Music Inn patrons from around New York City. In fact, few of the attendees can afford to live in Greenwich Village — Slatnick himself moved to Wall Street last year, where he “lives in the shadow of Deutsche Bank” — but the Music Inn, nestled in the Village, is where they all seek (and find) refuge.
87-year-old Leo Schonhaut plays the trumpet and sings a song he wrote almost every week; the audience knows it well and always joins in. Schonhaut is a permanent fixture at the shop and can usually be found at the chess board, coaxing customers to sit down and play a game: like a scene straight out of Washington Square Park. Schonhaut was winning the New York Marathon, for his age group, up until a couple years ago; one of his trophies proudly sits center stage in the front window of the Music Inn.
After Leo, performer-after-performer graces the makeshift stage, framed by strings of old-school Christmas lights in primary colors. The ‘open mic’ night might not be a money-maker for the store, with admission only costing a fiver, but it brings together artists, young and old, musical and comedic, who then return to the shop when in need of an instrument repair or an old record.
The frequency with which the same faces grace the store cannot go unnoticed. There are a lot of people that depend on the store as a place to commune and Slatnick says, “it’s growing like that more and more.”
“Perhaps we’ve become the why,” he says, and are now “serving some other function” for people.
Being the why for a community isn’t quantifiable though, neither is quirky management nor historical relevance. Although they serve to generate a loyal and interested customer base, it is the instrument sales, repairs, lessons, and odd jobs that actually pay the bills.
Odd jobs come in many forms. Of the more profitable, Slatnick sometimes rents out the shop’s space, and all of its eccentricities, for television productions or photoshoots that aim to capture an authentic Greenwich Village. Recently, he “got fleeced” by Pepsi Co, whose producers played on Slatnick’s willingness to help out emerging artists and failed to mention the multinational they worked for during the price negotiations.
Slatnick also pays two guys to work on comic books for stories that he dreams up; a very unprofitable venture that he continues simply because he likes it and it “helps keep the artists alive.”
However, Slatnick’s largest undertaking at the moment is hand-crafting his own instruments, first guitars, and now a special sitar, the design of which came to him in a dream. They sell for $3,000 a pop. He hopes they will become mainstream in the same way that the guitar became a part of the American consciousness in the 1960s.
If the sitars became a larger source of revenue, they could help fuel the Music Inn’s future in the Village. Slatnick doesn’t discount the fact that the landlords, an LLC whose owners have held the property through various legal entities since 1969, “haven’t raised the rent.”
Slatnick requests that they aren’t contacted to ask why.
One thing is for sure, he says, “the store doesn’t bring in the kind of money to pay the rents they charge around here anymore.” The old sandal-makers shop, for example, currently sits vacant with a $20,000-per-month price tag on it.
Slatnick acknowledges that selling world instruments and running ad hoc music lessons won’t make him rich, a notion that never possessed him anyway. “Wealth is made to be a lesson,” he explains, “not a thing to own. It’s like a passageway to true self-awareness.”
And Slatnick knows himself well enough to recognize that the real survivor of Greenwich Village is not the Music Inn.
“I’m attached to the store. It’s what keeps me alive, actually.”
