Bop Street Records makes a big move

Skeptics said he couldn’t pull it off, but Dave Voorhees and his team at Bop Street Records proved them wrong.

In the last few days Voorhees and his crew of workers, shown above, boxed up and cleared out hundreds of thousands of records from the shop.

A look at the empty shelves in the basement. Here’s a look before the records were boxed up, during a flood in October.

“This is the most stressed I’ve been my entire life,” Voorhees says, “But it’s all worked out.” Voorhees is leaving the space on Ballard Avenue that he’s occupied since 2001 for a new location on Market Street. He’s taking about 200,000 records with him and donating thousands more.

Voorhees has been told that his donation of 96,000 records is one of the largest one-time donations to the Seattle chapter of St. Vincent de Paul. On Wednesday, a crew from Two Men and a Truck loaded up a giant trailer with 788 boxes of LPs and 184 boxes of 78s.

The new Bop Street Records on Market Street.

The new Bop Street Record location will be in the old Tableau space at 2220 NW Market St. Voorhees plans to open the first week of July.

Geeky Swedes

The founders of My Ballard

9 thoughts to “Bop Street Records makes a big move”

  1. Bob Street is a great local business, what a fun place to visit with all the signatures on the wall, the bands and an amazing selection. I look forward to the new location.

  2. Strange record shopping there. How can you have so many records, but such a limited number of anything interesting. Jive Time in Fremont is one of the best. Not a huge selection but extremely high quality.

  3. Bop Street on Ballard Ave was always more of a museum than a record store. By the way he priced records, usually double what they would be with if they were in -mint- condition, I always suspected Dave’s real goal was to have 10 (or more) copies of every record ever made.

    The basement was a great way to kill an hour though.

  4. wow ,i thought you were gone.luckily i found out you had only moved,bop street has allways been my favorite record store,i have spent an entire saturday looking at records and talking to other jazz lovers.cant wait to see the new place.

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