Ninow’s Music closes up shop after almost 60 years of business

After almost 60 years of business, Ninow’s Music is closing up shop.

“I don’t have any money left,” said Ralph Vail, who has owned Ninow’s since 1967. “We’ve poured everything into Main Street, and it hasn’t paid off.”

Vail and his mother, Edna Vail, bought the store from Otto and Lisa Ninow about 10 years after it first opened on Railroad Avenue in 1956.

The store was located on Railroad Avenue until 2013, when Vail decided to move shop downtown to 30 West Main Street.

“I had no business on Railroad Avenue,” Vail said. “People just didn’t want to come there.”

But things never started looking up for the music store. Between big corporate discount stores like Walmart and Target moving into town and the steady rise of the internet retail sector, Vail says that small local music stores like his own have been struggling to keep up.

“It’s an industry-wide problem,” he said. “Even the bigger names that people know, like Guitar Center and Sam Ash – they’ve all been hit hard by the same issues.”

Vail has had customers tell him directly that they would rather purchase or rent certain items online than do the same business with his store.

“People don’t realize what a difference it would make to just shop at their local businesses instead of buying things online,” he said.

Vail ran the shop with his mother, Edna, for many years before she became paralyzed from a stroke several years ago. He was her primary caretaker, dividing his time between caring for his mother, who was slipping into dementia, and tending the storefront.

She passed away in December 2014.

“It’s an emotional time for me,” he said. “I don’t know where I’m going to go, or what I’m going to do.”

His most immediate concern is fulfilling about 800 rental instrument contracts, which will end this summer. Ninow’s Music rents out instruments to students in local schools through the National Educational Music Company. Those customers will be returning the instruments by July 15, when the contracts end—long after Vail will need to move out of the storefront.

“I need a place to store those instruments before I send them back,” he said.

Vail’s landlord, Georgia Malone, who purchased 30 West Main shortly after Vail moved into the ground floor storefront in 2013, says she will do everything she can to help Vail make the transition.

“I didn’t want Ninow’s to go out of business,” she said. “I wanted to keep a music store in Riverhead. But he just couldn’t catch up.”

She plans to offer Vail a space free of charge to take calls and store the rental instruments as they come in from customers before they need to be returned to the National Educational Music Company.

“Any way we can help him, we are going to help him,” she said.

In the meantime, Vail has moved almost everything out of the store. He will be out of the storefront by April 23.

“This store has been my life,” he said. “But I don’t have any other options. There’s nothing left for me to do.”