Hart’s Music Shop
This page covers Hart’s Music Shops and Let it Be Records
HART’S MUSIC SHOPS
Hart’s Music Shops were owned by Hartland H. Callendar, who started a record and radio repair business in 1928 when he was 21 years old. He was an inveterate collector of 78 rpm recordings, and called himself the “King of Records,” according to an article by Doug Grow in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (August 24, 1997). He and his wife Olivia owned three Hart’s Music Shops: two in St. Paul and one in Minneapolis.
12 EAST 6th STREET, ST. PAUL
The location on E. 6th Street first shows as Radio Service Laboratories in a two-line classified ad in the Minneapolis Tribune on October 28, 1930. (The St. Paul papers aren’t online.) The ad read, “Free advice plus guar. Service equals satisfaction.” The only other hit for this location was in 1944, in an article about mistaken identity. The shop was still referred to as Radio Service Laboratories.
The photo below (unknown origin) may be of the Service Lab location.
HART’S RECORDS, 387 ROBERT STREET, ST. PAUL (in true St. Paul style, between Fifth and Sixth)
The Robert Street location was in a building that had been the Aquarium Saloon and the Roxy Beauty Salon. It opened in 1949.
HART’S RECORDS, 1402 W. LAKE STREET at Girard Ave., Minneapolis
The only evidence of this store in the Minneapolis papers comes in March 1950. Grow’s article said that Callendar closed it in the 1940s.
The store at that address would have been in what was built in 1914 as the Calhoun Theater, designed by architect Clifford T. McElroy. The theater opened in 1915, and eight months later a significant expansion was added, making the capacity 1,430. The theater closed in 1921, and in 1922 it was converted into a ballroom. City permit records show alterations in the amount of $3,000 in September 1931, which supports a comment on Cinematreasures.com that it was converted from a ballroom into a showroom for a Nash automobile dealer sometime between 1930 and 1935.
Another comment on the CinemaTreasures was that it was a small private vocational school for about 40 years, and the entire building was painted olive green.
From 2005 to 2022, the building was the site of Stella’s Fish Café & Prestige Oyster Bar. In September 2022, a video of a rat crawling across a bin of rice at the restaurant went viral, causing the café to close on November 26, 2022.
THE CURIOUS END OF HART’S RECORDS
With the Minneapolis location closed, Callendar was apparently in the process of consolidating the two St. Paul stores on Rice Street, when he and his wife were involved in a terrible car accident on December 31, 1951. They were driving separate cars, one ahead of another, when a drunk driver hit Hartland’s car from behind, sending Hartland’s car into Olivia’s. Their serious injuries forced him to put their vast collection of new 78 records into storage, never selling a single record in the hopes of starting another store. He never did, and “made his living with the real estate he’d bought.” –His properties deteriorated and he and his wife lived in an apartment in the building where his records were stored in the basement. He refused to sell a single record.
Callendar died in 1996, and for an article he wrote for the Twin Cities Jazz Society, in 1997, singer and music historian Arne Fogel was invited to the warehouse where the collection was temporarily stored. He wrote (as quoted by Grow):
Imagine walking into a Twilight Zone-like time warp . . . Everything around you is frozen in time, as it existed in the ’50s: the formats, the artists, the entire music scene as experienced through the supply and demand of nearly a half-century ago.
(Minneapolis Star and Tribune, Doug Grow, August 24, 1997)
On August 30 and 31, 1997, the collection of 250,000 records and advertising memorabilia and phonographs was auctioned off by Smith Auction Service in East Bethel for about $210,000. Most of the records had never been played. The more valuable records were auctioned in small lots that went for $100 to $3000. A multi-record set called “The Jazz Scene” was sold for $800. Only 5,000 set were made and four of them were up for bids. A porcelain Columbia Records advertising sign in the shape of a record went for $1,250 went for $1,250. (Minneapolis Star Tribune, September 3, 1997)
LET IT BE RECORDS
Of the August 30-31, 1997 auction, Let it Be Records, a Downtown Minneapolis record store owned by Ryan Cameron, paid $100,000 for a warehouse lot of more than 100,000 records and advertising material from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Cameron said he’ll hold a sale or auction to sell most of the the items, in about six months. Cameron also bought some items at the regular auction on Saturday and Sunday, mostly jazz and blues, for himself, saying “records are made for playing.” (Minneapolis Star Tribune, September 3, 1997)
Various addresses found for Let it Be Records include:
- 1001 Nicollet Mall
- Loring Park
- 7th and Hennepin
- 680 Transfer Road Suite #4, St. Paul (2020 address). According to its website, the store has been selling music and music memorabilia online since 1997.
Cameron started Let it Be Records in 1987, and with his purchase of the 250,000 record Hart Collection in 1997, he had 300,000 records by April 1998. (He had also purchased the 40,000 record inventory of Pyramid Records, which closed in the mid ’80s.) His plan was to start his own auction house to help sell the treasure he bought for $100,000 in September 1997. The first phase of the auction, with 1,300 titles, started in April 1998. (Minneapolis Star Tribune, Jon Bream, April 17, 1998)
In mid June, 2005, Cameron closed his Downtown Minneapolis location at 10th Street and Nicollet Mall, where the article said he had been for 16 years (1989) to make way for a condo tower that was never built. When the store left, Cameron had remove the “Let” and “Be” plastic letters for customer souvenirs, but couldn’t safely reach “It” on its final day of business. In September 2012, Target was building new office space on the property, but would not give Cameron his “It” back, saying it would be used in an art installation inside the building. Cameron countered, “The history of Let It Be Records is not owned by Target. It is in the collective consciousness of the customers and workers who used to frequent it.” (Minneapolis Star Tribune, Chris Riemenschneider, September 14, 2012)
In November 2015, Cameron and Grumpy’s bar proprietor Tom Hazelmeyer owned “It” Records, inside Find Furnish Antique Store, 13 Fifth Ave. NE, Minneapolis.
In November 2025, Cameron put the collection up for auction on eBay, first asking $1,999, then revising his bid to $999.99.
Let’s hope it stays in good hands.