For forty-five years, Alex Carozza has run a small accordion shop near Times Square. It’s one of the last fixtures of the old Music Row on Forty-eighth Street, and Carozza, after a lifetime of repairing musical instruments, still works six days a week while teaching some younger apprentices the skills of the trade.
The shop is spread over three stories. The first is a small showroom packed with colorful accordions, bandoneons, and melodeons. While a standard accordion costs around four hundred and fifty dollars, a handmade squeezebox will run you upward of ten thousand dollars. On the second floor, Alex and his staff do repairs at skinny workbenches that are cluttered with the guts of disassembled instruments. The top floor is a storeroom that’s lined with accordions, boxes of keys, and old bellows.
With customers coming from around the world, the shop is a lively place, with bits of music floating up the stairs all day. In some ways the shop seems like an extension of Alex himself, who always has a story or a spot of advice for anyone who shares his love of the accordion.
Video by Nate Lavey.
