J&R Plays Music Again Near Ground Zero

J&R Music & Computer World, the 300,000-square-foot New York store that is less than a quarter-mile from the World Trade Center wreckage, will reopen for business today after having been shut for nearly six weeks.

According to Rachelle Friedman, who started the business in 1971 with her husband Joe using wedding money for their investment, the company remained afloat through catalog and Internet sales. Before the attacks, J&R, which reports annual sales at a little more than $300 million, was rated as the Number One electronics retailer in New York based on revenues. It ranks 10th or 12th among consumer electronics retailers nationwide.

Though many of the store's DVD players and computer hard drives were ruined by the soot that blew through the doors on September 11 – and the fact that for a time rescue workers used the store as a triage center – the six-storefront building at 23 Park Row was undamaged and none of the retailer's 650 employees was killed. The Friedmans said they had to throw out electronics products worth tens of millions of dollars and replace carpeting, repaint walls, suck the ash out of escalators, clean credit card terminals and cash registers and revamp the heating, ventilation and air conditioning system.

According to a report in The New York Times, “though the air outside smells like Coke cans on fire, the record store smells like a record store.”