City orders vinyl records off Culture Clash roof

Records which have been on building since 2010 declared ’nuisance’

Culture Clash Records on Secor Road in West Toledo.

Old records, warped from time spent in the sun, must come down from the roof of a West Toledo record store, the city has declared.

A nuisance complaint, issued by the city's Department of Neighborhoods on Jan. 6 declares the vinyl records, which have been up at Culture Clash since 2010, as “decayed and to the point of being a nuisance.”

City officials have not returned calls today seeking comment.

Store owner Pat O'Connor started taking down the nearly 800 records Wednesday afternoon.

“It really gave a feature to this corner,” said Mr. O'Connor whose store is on Secor Road just north of West Sylvania Avenue. “People knew the building really well. It was a great landmark. … People love it.”

People really do seem to love it. When Brittany Adams, a Culture Clash employee who manages the store's social media accounts, posted to Facebook news of the records coming down, people reacted.

The post, as of today, was shared 611 times and has hundreds of comments, far more interaction than a typical post on the page.

Wednesday night, an online petition, for the records to stay up and those taken down to be replaced, was generated. The petition, which seeks 100 signatures, had 92 as of 12:15 p.m.

Mr. O'Connor said he agreed to have all of the records down by mid-March. Wednesday he took down about 375 from the northern side of the roof and estimated another 400 were screwed onto the roof facing Secor.

“It's so much easier to take them down,” Mr. O'Connor said.

The records went up in June, 2010, when the store was “inches, for a year or so, to closing because business was so slow” due to the rebuilding of Secor.

“One day I thought, man, we could shove some albums up there,” Mr. O'Connor said. “We have the time to do it; I went out and did it. They warped almost immediately, within minutes, but I loved it. I thought it was awesome.”

He called the installation an “ever-changing art project.”

A city inspector was called to look at the record roof in January after someone complained, Mr. O'Connor said. He figures someone didn't like the way the records looked, causing them to lodge the complaint.

About four records would fall off the roof every year, but none caused any problems, he said.

Mr. O'Connor said he isn't sad about losing the records from the roof; now he's trying to think of something “cooler and stranger” for the store.