The Chicago Store in Tucson..."The Mosrite Burial Ground"
Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2009 2:25 am
Any of you guys ever go to the Chicago Store in Tucson, Arizona? It's all been cleaned out now so I feel comfortable talking about it.
This was one of the craziest places I've ever been. It was known to many as the "Mosrite Burial Ground."
Basically, the Chicago Store is an old, four-story warehouse in downtown Tucson. The bottom floor serves as a music instruments store for everything from pianos to violins to guitars. However, back in the 50's and 60's and 70's, the place was a major distributor for guitars and amps in the southwest, including Mosrite.
I'm not sure what went wrong, but at some point, something went horribly wrong. Probably the whole guitar business taking a dive in the early 1970's. The upper floors began piling up with unsold guitars, blemished guitars, broken guitars, creating a maze of rooms filled WITH MORE CRAP THAN YOU'VE EVER SEEN IN YOUR ENTIRE LIFE! There were two or three stories of warehouse, with two giant football field size rooms, along with dozens of smaller rooms, just filled with dirty, dusty, broken, rotting musical crap!
Now, you're probably thinking to yourself, why didn't vintage guitar dealers go in there and buy this stuff out? The simple answer is that they all tried. The owner of the place, probably rightfully convinced that he had been ripped off in the past, would always quote about 3 times what something was worth on any given day. he was completely impossible to deal with. Over the years that I went there, I probably brought down 20 or 30 guitars, amps, etc. to ask the owner what he wanted for it, and he always, and I mean ALWAYS, was able to come up with a figure that was almost exactly twice what the highest conceivable price could be for that item. The only thing I ever bought there was a Mosrite shipping box for twenty bucks. My friends made fun of me at the time, but hey, we're Mosrite geeks here, right?
I got an original Mosrite banner in very faded condition that I got from a guy who said he got it out of the Chicago Store in the 80's--it was in one of the upstairs windows being used to seal a crack in the window sill!
There used to be hundreds of wayward Mosrites up there, all odd models like Celebrities, acoustics, 12-strings, Joe Maphis models, etc. They were ALL messed up in some way. After a few years of people trying to deal with the guy, people just started stealing stuff out of the place. I would go there about once a year and every year I would come back and the Mosrites were missing more parts. A shame, but on the other hand, the guy really was impossible to deal with.
In the last few years they must have sold it all off because I see a pawn shop in Costa Mesa selling a bunch of the Chicago Store stuff on ebay, and there was a guy on the Sunset Strip who had a bunch of it too. It really was something to see.
I managed to take a few photos of the madness. In these two photos you'll see the way it looked. Everything was dirty and broken and missing parts, but it was like stepping into King Tut's Mosrite tomb. Anybody else have any good Chicago Store stories??
Deke
This was one of the craziest places I've ever been. It was known to many as the "Mosrite Burial Ground."
Basically, the Chicago Store is an old, four-story warehouse in downtown Tucson. The bottom floor serves as a music instruments store for everything from pianos to violins to guitars. However, back in the 50's and 60's and 70's, the place was a major distributor for guitars and amps in the southwest, including Mosrite.
I'm not sure what went wrong, but at some point, something went horribly wrong. Probably the whole guitar business taking a dive in the early 1970's. The upper floors began piling up with unsold guitars, blemished guitars, broken guitars, creating a maze of rooms filled WITH MORE CRAP THAN YOU'VE EVER SEEN IN YOUR ENTIRE LIFE! There were two or three stories of warehouse, with two giant football field size rooms, along with dozens of smaller rooms, just filled with dirty, dusty, broken, rotting musical crap!
Now, you're probably thinking to yourself, why didn't vintage guitar dealers go in there and buy this stuff out? The simple answer is that they all tried. The owner of the place, probably rightfully convinced that he had been ripped off in the past, would always quote about 3 times what something was worth on any given day. he was completely impossible to deal with. Over the years that I went there, I probably brought down 20 or 30 guitars, amps, etc. to ask the owner what he wanted for it, and he always, and I mean ALWAYS, was able to come up with a figure that was almost exactly twice what the highest conceivable price could be for that item. The only thing I ever bought there was a Mosrite shipping box for twenty bucks. My friends made fun of me at the time, but hey, we're Mosrite geeks here, right?
I got an original Mosrite banner in very faded condition that I got from a guy who said he got it out of the Chicago Store in the 80's--it was in one of the upstairs windows being used to seal a crack in the window sill!
There used to be hundreds of wayward Mosrites up there, all odd models like Celebrities, acoustics, 12-strings, Joe Maphis models, etc. They were ALL messed up in some way. After a few years of people trying to deal with the guy, people just started stealing stuff out of the place. I would go there about once a year and every year I would come back and the Mosrites were missing more parts. A shame, but on the other hand, the guy really was impossible to deal with.
In the last few years they must have sold it all off because I see a pawn shop in Costa Mesa selling a bunch of the Chicago Store stuff on ebay, and there was a guy on the Sunset Strip who had a bunch of it too. It really was something to see.
I managed to take a few photos of the madness. In these two photos you'll see the way it looked. Everything was dirty and broken and missing parts, but it was like stepping into King Tut's Mosrite tomb. Anybody else have any good Chicago Store stories??
Deke
......but......keep em coming!! 
....... 
