611Records

611 Records opened in 1993 at 611 South 4th Street, a few steps below South Street at the top of Fabric Row, in a city that had dancers and DJs but nowhere dependable to buy the records they were dancing to. The store took its name from the address.

It stocked what Philadelphia could not easily get: house, techno, drum & bass and jungle, arriving as imports and promos and white labels with nothing on them but a stamp. The bet was that if the right records were in the room, the right people would find the room.

For scale: Ovum Recordings, the label Josh Wink and King Britt started that would carry Philadelphia's name abroad, was founded in 1994. The store opened first — and Ovum would later move in upstairs.

The counter was the point. You came in, you handed over a stack, and somebody behind the register cued them up one at a time while the room listened over your shoulder. Records got sold because a person you trusted put them on.

It was rarely quiet. One regular, writing the week the store closed, remembered it plainly: “Back in the 90s when EVERYONE owned two turntables and a mixer, this place was ground zero. It was always crowded. I'd often have to wait for a turntable to sample the newest arrivals.”

The first person hired was Josh Wink. He later moved Ovum Recordings, the label he had started with King Britt, into the office above the shop — so that for a stretch of the nineties the building held a record store on the ground floor, Ovum upstairs, and Society Hill Recordings on the third. Shop and label kept a close relationship the whole time. 611 South 4th Street was not simply a store that sold dance music; it was the address dance music in Philadelphia was run from.

Through the nineties the store was a working address for a generation of Philadelphia DJs — people who clerked there, spun there, or simply never left.

A record store that knows what sells eventually presses records. 611 became Sixeleven Records — credited on labels as both “611” and spelled out — and ran two more imprints alongside it: 611 DnB for drum & bass, and Society Hill Recordings, a deep house label started in 2000 and run out of the third floor of the same building.

The most consequential thing it released was the Sixeleven DJ Mixseries: a shop-run mix CD line that handed volumes to Dieselboy, Derrick L. Carter and Charles Feelgood. A record store on 4th Street was putting out mix CDs by people who headlined nationally.

The new records were at 611. Everything else went across the street to 612 — the second shop, for used stock and back catalog. When somebody in the city wanted to sell a collection, it usually ended up in one of the two rooms.

The 611 logo went onto shirts, and the shirts went out on tour with the DJs who bought their records there. By the mid-nineties the apparel was being distributed to dozens of stores across the country, which meant the name travelled to cities where the store itself was only a rumour.

The store's own line on it was simple: “When the store was open, we put the 611 label on everything.”

611 closed in the summer of 2007, fourteen and a half years after it opened. Nothing dramatic happened to it. The whole model came apart at once: the customers who used to come in every week were downloading instead, imports got expensive, and rent did not.

Adam X, who ran Sonic Groove in New York and closed after almost exactly the same run, put the arithmetic bluntly: “You would have to sell a 1000 records a month just to pay the rent.”

For a few weeks nobody was sure it was really over — the forums argued about whether the store was closing or moving. It was closing.

What closed was a retail business. What did not close was everything that had passed across that counter.

In 2010 the name returned as The 611 Lifestyle, an apparel line built in two directions: DJ Life, which kept the original graphics and the original attitude, and Luxe Life, a premium menswear collection for the people who had grown up in the first one.