Secrets of the City

Yes. But in a neighborhood that has better cineaste traffic. I love the store (as I did Box Office Video on Selby in St. Paul before it) but the neighborhood it’s in never completed the leap from crack alley to hip locale. Get thee located near a hip, cool bar and stay open later so the bar traffic can impulse-rent some Bergmann after getting shot down three times by that uber-goth chick sitting alone in that booth. Redbox can’t beat that.

I didn’t realized 24th and Lyndale was such a dangerous area…

I wonder how Nicollet Village Video has survived all these years. Porn, I suppose?

Also, isn’t this the same area that has th CC Club, red dragon, leaning tower, Mortimer’s, and the Herk? pretty cool and hip area as far as i remember.

I don’t know what Rick is talking about, I lived maybe a block away and the area was fine.

My favorite places in that area are Bob’s Java Hut, Bulldog and Treehouse Records. It would seem to be a cool, hip area to me. Not great for parking, I suppose, but there are plenty of side streets nearby.

It is, Rick is probably some square from the suburbs and doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

The rest of my comment is missing…it read, “waits for the Rat to slam coffee shops, beer joints and indie record stores.”

I actually thought Rick was referring to their old location on 26th near Nicollet, which, as much as I like Whittier neighborhood, isn’t quite 100% a “hip locale” as such.

Also, isn’t this the same area that has th CC Club, red dragon, leaning tower, Mortimer’s, and the Herk? pretty cool and hip area as far as i remember.

But even 26th & Nicollet still wasn’t what I would call “crack alley.” Go a couple of miles east of there, though, or a few blocks southeast …

Probably a casualty of Netflix and Redbox. times change, too bad for the owners but a fact of life I guess.

oh and the economy

what the…? sorry about that!

I dig Video Universe in Robbinsdale but have about $45 in late fees on their books so I haven’t been back for a while. I love going to a video store like Video Universe over VOD..and hate mailing things…but when a last minute business trip or getting busy at work means that the three new releases I got spend four days in my basement and rack up a $50 fee…I HAVE to go with something like Netflix. My wife gets pretty mad at those $200 movie months..and there are a lot of them.

I read that post and I think what have we, as a people, become?

People who use Netflix.

I know it’s cool to poo-poo the putative suburbanites, but location has been a problem for CR. I live in the Wedge and used to go there all the time when they were located at Franklin and Lyndale, but then they moved over to 26th and Nicollet. That neighborhood is not cool: parking was a horror; if you were coming from the Wedge in a car it was difficult to access, due to the westbound flow of 26th; the side streets were dark and unsafe; and walking there was definitely a bad idea. Maybe the true urban hipsters would go anyhow, but the bourgeois cineastes (like myself) found other places to go. I did talk to the owner once in passing about the difficulties of the new location near Nicollet, and he was defensive and dismissive of my concerns. So, I stopped going. By the time they moved back to Lyndale, not only was the thrill gone, but again you had a situation where arriving and departing easily in a car was impossible, and who is gonna schlepp six blocks in the winter? I think this is an example of poor planning, and maybe the veneer of odd lefty politics. They needed to move into a high traffic bougie area with a customer base of pointy idle eggheads and ready parking, like along Hennepin between 26th and Franklin. In any event, I hope they can get it together to reopen. I may not have gone there much anymore, but I liked the idea that CR was around.

“…pointy idle eggheads…”

I’m totally going to use that term.