Leonard “Lenny” Silver was a music industry lifer whose career arc traced the entire history of the American record business — from stockroom to distribution empire to retail legend. His Record Theatre chain, anchored in Buffalo, became one of the largest and longest-running independent record stores in the country, and his impact on how Western New York experienced music is difficult to overstate.
From Stockboy to Mogul
Silver started as a stockboy in a Rochester record store basement before joining the Navy at 17, serving as a radio operator in the South Pacific during World War II. After the war, he returned to the record store and worked his way up through every position in the business. In 1954, he moved to Buffalo and took a promotional role at a distribution company, where he promoted artists including Andy Williams, Bobby Vinton, and the Everly Brothers — hands-on work that taught him how records moved from pressing plants to turntables.
Distribution and Retail Empire
In 1964, Silver launched his own wholesale music distribution company, which at its peak became the fourth-largest record distributor in the country. But his most visible legacy is Record Theatre, the retail chain he founded in 1976 at 1800 Main Street in Buffalo. The original store was, for a time, the largest record store in the world, generating sales of $80,000 per day in the late 1970s. The chain expanded to 37 locations at its peak, serving as the place where generations of Western New Yorkers discovered music — flipping through bins, arguing over albums, and spending entire afternoons in the aisles.
A Buffalo Institution
Silver died in 2017 at age 90. The City of Buffalo honored him by naming a section of Main Street “Lenny Silver Way” near the original Record Theatre location. Two Record Theatre stores survive today, buoyed by vinyl’s resurgence, carrying forward a legacy that stretches back to a stockroom in Rochester and a teenager who loved records enough to build an empire around them.