Radio-Active Records' Six Tons of Vinyl Has a New Home on Federal Highway

Furnished by Radio-Active Records

Mikey Ramirez, Jasper Delaini, Natalie Smallish, and Richard Vergez

​Last week, Richard Vergez unexpectedly found himself dozens of feet in the air balancing on a narrow ledge. Underneath, car after car roared by on Federal Highway as he carefully wielded a paint roller. That was no big deal, though, compared to many other Herculean acts performed within a 48-hour period. Vergez, along with colleagues Mikey Ramirez, Jasper Delaini, Natalie Smallish and a motley crew of friends and volunteers, lifted an estimated six tons of records and other bric-a-brac to move Radio-Active Records to its new home.

Radio-Active itself represents a fiercely scrappy independent spirit in a fiercely crappy time for the music industry in general -- and record stores in particular. The store's move from Fort Lauderdale's Sunrise Boulevard to new, dramatically more visible digs at 845 N. Federal Highway is even more DIY. Over the past two weeks, the crew has hauled crates and crates of records, renovated the new space's interior, and even refurbished the exterior, with the only extra help coming from a few dedicated volunteer customers. But rather than dwell on a bare-bones budget, the can-do spirit of the move -- and the choice of location for the store -- signals a renewed burst of energy both for Radio-Active and its new neighborhood.

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​Radio-Active has already come a long way in the ten years since Ramirez, now the store's operations manager, started there as a sales associate. For one thing, it wasn't even Radio-Active -- it was the CD Collector, a smaller store among several. "There used to be a multitude of CD stores -- especially in Broward County, there were six or seven just in a two-mile radius from here," Ramirez recalls. As the competition dropped off, CD Collector retooled. With the help of Vergez's creative branding and design work, CD Collector became the expanded Radio-Active Records and shifted its focus toward vinyl, local music, and rarities.

Over the years, Radio-Active regulars have enjoyed the store's browsing-friendly vibe -- no High Fidelity-style snobbery -- when they could find it. The store was more or less hidden from street view and usually required complicated traffic maneuvers to reach at its original location in a Sunrise Boulevard strip mall. "At the end of the day, we were hidden, no matter how you look at it," Ramirez says. "People would say, 'It's one of the best-kept secrets in Fort Lauderdale,' but when it's your source of income, you don't want that. You want everybody to see you."