Crooked Beat Records in Alexandria, Virginia, will only be open for a few more days in its current Del Ray location.
Devastating flooding damaged the store’s building and hundreds of vinyl records, some of them extremely valuable. The store is reopening Thursday, Friday and Saturday, which will be its last day operating at its current location on Mt. Vernon Avenue.
After that, the future of the store is uncertain.
“We’ll keep people posted on where we find a new location,” owner Bill Daly said in a message to customers on Instagram. “We really love Del Ray. We want to stay in Del Ray. So, we’re going to keep looking and hope things will get back to normal real soon.”
Daly told WTOP earlier this month that around 400 records, worth tens of thousands of dollars, were destroyed in a flood that took place at the record store Sunday, Jan. 11.
Around five inches of standing water filled the basement store, damaging any albums stored on lower shelves. The records will still play, but the value of many of the rare albums is destroyed, as the covers are ruined by water damage.
Among the treasures damaged: a radio station-only Talking Heads, a Japanese pressing of “Meet the Beatles” and an original pressing of a Ronettes record valued at around $400.
Crooked Beat Records has been at its current location for three years but has been open for nearly three decades. And over those years, Daly told WTOP the store grew a huge base of dedicated customers that have shown an outpouring of support since the flooding.
WTOP’s Luke Lukert contributed to this report.