STORY · REGGAE
Orange Street to North Parade: Kingston's record district
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A few downtown blocks pressed, sold and clashed the whole music into being.
How the dense cluster of shops, studios and pressing plants around Orange Street and North Parade made Kingston a self-reinforcing music machine.
Beat Street
For two decades the whole apparatus of Jamaican music fit inside a few downtown blocks. Orange Street, known as Beat Street, and the shops around North Parade put retailers, producers, engineers and pressing plants within shouting distance, so a tune could be cut, pressed and selling by the weekend.
The addresses read like a map of the music: Rockers International at 135 Orange Street, Prince Buster's Record Shack at 127, Coxsone's Muzik City around the corner, and Winston Riley's Techniques shop off North Parade. On King Street, retailer Neville Foo-Loy incubated younger shopkeepers from a single storefront.
Proximity was the technology: the district itself was the feedback loop.
That density fed the island's pressing infrastructure and made the record district the nervous system of the sound. As the trade thinned, a handful of survivors — Rockers chief among them — turned their counters into living museums of Beat Street's golden age.