Vintage, records & makers in Pittsburgh
6 vintage shops, record stores and maker spaces in Pittsburgh, Jerry's Records, Amazing Books and Records and Get Hip Recordings among them. Deep-crate digging, oddball inventory, and places where someone still makes the thing they're selling you. Every entry is hand-vetted against real sources — not scraped off a top-ten list or averaged out of crowd ratings.
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Jerry's Records
Jerry Weber's record habit started in 1976 with a shop called Record Graveyard and a sign that read WE BUY RECORDS; the Squirrel Hill location has been going since 1994, in a 10,000-plus-square-foot former car dealership up a flight of stairs off Murray Avenue. The stock runs to about a million used records, added to daily, which is less a store than a filing problem you get to browse. Weber sold to longtime employee Chris Grauzer in 2017 and the operation didn't blink. A 2023 expansion called Future Zone added the other physical formats — cassettes, CDs, VHS, DVD — for people whose nostalgia isn't strictly 12-inch. Twice a year the dollar sales happen, and those are the days regulars take off work.
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Amazing Books and Records
The Forbes Avenue store calls itself Pittsburgh's largest independent used book and used record shop, and its posted hours are the tell: Sunday through Thursday 10am to 10pm, Friday 10am to sunset, then dark for twenty-five hours before reopening Saturday one hour after sunset and running to midnight. That's Sabbath observance rendered as a schedule, and it means the store's busiest social hour is a Saturday night that starts whenever the sun says so — 9:30pm in July and August, considerably earlier in December. On Thursdays 6 to 10pm and again during the Saturday post-sunset window, they hand browsers cold beer for free, no purchase required, ID at the door, 21-plus. There's a second location downtown at the base of One Oxford Centre keeping ordinary daytime hours for people who need a book before 5pm. The New York Times wrote it up in 2019, which the shop has not stopped mentioning, reasonably.
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Get Hip Recordings
Get Hip started in 1986 as a way for members of Pittsburgh garage band The Cynics — Gregg Kostelich, Michael Kastelic, Bill von Hagen — to put out their own records on their own terms, beginning with singles mailed to a fan club. Forty years on it's a label and an international distributor moving stock to and from Europe, Japan, and the States, with a catalog past 20,000 titles and releases by The Fleshtones, The Gories, New Bomb Turks, Man or Astro-man?, and Turbonegro. Kostelich runs it with his wife Barbara Garcia-Bernardo out of a warehouse in the R.J. Casey Industrial Park on the North Side, and the retail counter is inside the working operation. The posted hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 to 6. It looks like a distribution floor because that's what it is, which is the entire appeal.
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Eons Fashion Antique
Richard Parsakian opened Eons in 1986 out of a home collection and has been on Ellsworth Avenue ever since, stocking clothing from the 1880s through the 1980s that is meant to be worn rather than displayed. The knit tie wall runs past sixty pieces, 1950s through 1980s, and is one of the larger such collections in the region. Roughly a tenth of the business comes from the entertainment industry: Colleen Atwood pulled from here for The Silence of the Lambs, Deborah Scott for Titanic. There is also a rotating rack of authenticated vintage designer garments, which is where the prices climb. Parsakian co-published Pittsburgh's first LGBTQIA+ newspaper in the 1970s and was named the Three Rivers Business Alliance LGBTQIA+ Leader of the Year in 2023; the shop has been an open room for that community since it opened.
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Doomed Planet Comics (the former Copacetic Comics storefront)
Copacetic Comics is still very much a going concern, but it now runs as an online and mail-order operation out of a Forest Hills suite; the shop you actually walk into is Doomed Planet Comics, its brick-and-mortar affiliate, which took over what Copacetic's own site calls "the former Copacetic Comics digs" on the third floor at 3138 Dobson Street. The climb has not changed and neither has the buying logic: alternative and indie work, international editions, small-press art comics, manga that no chain store would carry. The names on the shelves run to Lynda Barry, Julie Doucet, Jillian Tamaki, Shirato Sanpei — art and literature shelved as such, not sorted by superhero franchise. It is a small room up a lot of stairs, which is exactly why it rewards the hour rather than the ten-minute drop-in.
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Roxanne's Dried Flowers
Roxanne started in 1994 on a four-acre farm, growing flowers and turning her dried harvests into wreaths and arrangements; the Penn Avenue storefront is what that turned into after three decades. The stock is entirely dried and preserved — bunches of flowers, foliage, grains, branches, fruits and seed pods — packed high enough that the room reads as a barn loft that wandered into the Strip District. The house pitch is practical rather than sentimental: dried stems need no water and no refrigeration, so the footprint is a fraction of a fresh bouquet's and the thing survives on your table for years. Alongside the botanicals there are vases, ribbon, home fragrance and a shelf of local pottery and original paintings. It is a shop with one obsession and no interest in diversifying out of it.
Vintage, records & makers in Pittsburgh — FAQ
Which vintage, record & maker shops in Pittsburgh are the strangest?
Ranked by how strange they actually are: Jerry's Records, Eons Fashion Antique and Amazing Books and Records. Jerry's Records — Jerry Weber's record habit started in 1976 with a shop called Record Graveyard and a sign that read WE BUY RECORDS; the Squirrel Hill location has been going since 1994, in a 10,000-plus-square-foot former car dealership up a flight of stairs off Murray Avenue.
Is this a good weird date in Pittsburgh?
That's what the list is built for. Every entry has a specific move rather than a vague recommendation — at Jerry's Records, for instance: Get there when the doors open Saturday at 10, agree on a hard rule — each of you picks three records for the other, nothing you'd buy for yourself, twenty-dollar ceiling — then take the stack down Murray Avenue for a late lunch and defend your choices. Whoever picked worse buys.
How were these vintage, record & maker shops chosen?
An agentic research system digs for the genuinely obscure — the spots even locals miss — and every one is verified against real sources before it makes the list. We deliberately skip the landmarks already on every Pittsburgh guide.