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Two weekends from now, Chicago will welcome its newest music store: Onion City Records. Bridgeport Records co-owners Vick Lavender and Jerry Morrison soft launched a new brick-and-mortar shop at 1812 W. Chicago during West Fest in mid-July. “We’ve been popping up on the weekends over there, just so we can get a sense of what sells in the community,” Morrison says. “I think we’re probably gonna have a pretty good gauge on that now.” Onion City Records will hold an official grand opening on Saturday, September 12.

Lavender and Morrison have been steadily growing their businesses since July 2024, when they opened Bridgeport Records at 3336 S. Halsted. They quickly outgrew the space and moved north to a larger storefront at 3251 S. Halsted, where they held a grand opening in February 2025. For Morrison, opening a shop in West Town felt like a natural next step. “We want to bring a bit of the south side to the north side,” he says. “I lived up in that neighborhood for years. My family immigrated from Poland into West Town, so someone from my family had lived in that neighborhood for 120 years.” 

Onion City is a couple blocks west of Ashland and a stone’s throw from Every Now and Then, the newest streetwear shop from internationally acclaimed designer Joe Freshgoods. Morrison says he looked at 45 storefronts before he found the Chicago Avenue space. “Rents have gotten crazy on the north side,” he says. “But we found a spot in a new building on a good commercial strip. We’re gonna function as a neighborhood record store. There’s a lot of record stores there—we’re not gonna do what these other guys do. They don’t do what we do.”

Onion City will be similar to Bridgeport Records, which stocks a broad variety of dance music. This reflects the owners’ tastes: Lavender is a respected deep-house producer, and he also runs the label Sophisticado Recordings. Onion City will sell loads of dance records, plus music that overlaps in history or style with house and techno, including jazz, hip-hop, R&B, funk, industrial, and new wave. Morrison mentions that both shops focus on and support local artists. “I buy direct from one hundred Chicago music producers,” he says.

Morrison is still stocking Onion City for opening day. “We’re probably gonna open with about five thousand records, which is more than double what we opened with in Bridgeport,” he says. “The Bridgeport store is now at fifteen thousand titles. All things go well, we should be able to grow that within a year.” 

Morrison wants the new shop to be more than a place where people buy records. “We’re gonna have a small lounge in Onion City,” he says. “We’re gonna have a big-screen TV with a gaming station. So you’re gonna be able to come in, hang out, listen to some dope music, play some video games, talk about music.”

Morrison expects Onion City to be open Thursday through Sunday, but he hasn’t yet settled on its hours of operation. “We’re gonna start out with an eight o’clock closing time,” he says, “but I can see us staying open till nine or ten on Fridays and Saturdays, because we like to have a scene going.” He’s still working out the plans for Onion City’s grand opening party on September 12, though Lavender will certainly perform. They’ll post updates to Bridgeport Records’ Instagram.

Morrison is already dreaming of opening the duo’s next brick-and-mortar shop. “Ultimately, we want to open in downtown Chicago,” he says. “We’re gonna open a shop in New York as well. It’s gonna be representing Chicago musicians—dance music as well as jazz, R&B, and hip-hop. Chicago has a huge reputation nationally and worldwide for music, and we want to represent that in as many places as we can.”

From Thursday, September 3, through Sunday, September 6, the second annual Sound & Gravity fills eight venues in and around Bricktown with music. (Longtime contributor Bill Meyer has previewed the festival for the Reader.) This wolf is also stoked for the free satellite programming that’s new to this year’s festival. On Saturday, September 5, the Chicago Film Society will screen rare 16-millimeter movies of blues and jazz performances by the likes of Cab Calloway, Tiny Grimes, Duke Ellington, and Martha Wayne. The films come from a collection that once belonged to Delmark Records founder Bob Koester, who died in 2021. Koester also owned Jazz Record Mart, which closed in 2016, for more than 60 years, contributing incalculably to the local scene. The shop he opened in Irving Park a few months later, Bob’s Blues & Jazz Mart, remains open. The Chicago Film Society screening takes place at the Athenaeum Center on Saturday, September 5, from 2 PM till 5 PM.

Sound & Gravity venues also host this year’s CHIRP Record Fair, which is returning after the station declared the 20th fair to be the last in 2024. Details of who will be tabling are scarce, but CHIRP promises loads of vinyl and CDs plus some cassettes and DVDs. The first two days of the record fair—Thursday and Friday, September 3 and 4—will take place at Rockwell on the River from 4 PM till 9 PM. For its third and final day on Saturday, September 5, the fair will move to the Athenaeum Center, where it runs from 2 PM till 7 PM. The usual entry fee is waived this time—it’s free to come in and browse.