Most record shops that last four decades on one block do it by staying visible: sidewalk crates, a sandwich board, a window you can see from a moving car. Yesterday and Today Records did the opposite. It sits on the second floor of a 1960s strip plaza on Bird Road, reached only by a narrow cement stairway, and the window at street level is so thick with vintage LP jackets that a driver passing at forty miles an hour would have no reason to know it's there.
Ask Karpo whether today's crate-digging crowd calls for an early climb up the stairs or a slower afternoon browse, and which genre sections tend to move fastest.
An upstairs shop that never went street-level
The address is 9274 SW 40th St, on the stretch of Bird Road near the Palmetto Expressway, in what most locals would call West Miami-Dade rather than Kendall proper, though the two blur together out here. The building itself is unremarkable from a distance: faded mustard-colored paint, black metal storefront railings, the kind of low-rise commercial plaza Miami built by the hundreds in the 1960s and mostly stopped renovating decades ago.
Getting inside means finding the stairway and going up, which is a small but real filter. A ground-floor shop invites foot traffic by accident; a second-floor shop only gets visited by people who already know it's worth the climb. That single architectural fact does more to explain the store's regular-customer culture than any amount of curation would.
Genres stacked instead of curated
Inside, the room is cramped and rectangular, and the records are sorted alphabetically rather than by genre or era. That means a shopper hunting for, say, Brazilian psych from the early 1970s has to flip past everything else filed under the same letter, rather than being handed a neatly labeled section to browse.
The stock spans new and used LPs, 45s, and CDs, with particular depth in 60s and 70s rock, Latin and world music, psych, and jazz — genres that tend to reward exactly the kind of patient, letter-by-letter searching the layout demands. It is less a curated selection than a working archive, built up over more than forty years of buying, selling, and trading collections.
The climb sets the pace
Because the room is small and the stock is dense, there is no fast way to shop here. A quick in-and-out run for one specific title is possible if you already know the letter you need, but anyone browsing without a target should expect to spend real time working through bins one row at a time.
That slower pace is also why the shop still buys and trades collections rather than only selling from a fixed catalog. New arrivals get folded into the same alphabetical system, which means the crates a regular flipped through last month are not quite the same crates today.
- Access is via a narrow cement stairway to the second floor — there is no street-level entrance.
- Stock is filed alphabetically throughout, not sorted by genre section.
- The shop buys, sells, and trades vinyl, CD, and cassette collections.
- Record Store Day draws a crowd large enough to pack the narrow room.
- Formats go beyond vinyl to include 45s, 8-tracks, cassettes, and music DVDs.
- Books, magazines, T-shirts, and record-cleaning supplies sit alongside the records.
What the inventory actually holds
The catalog runs wider than vinyl alone. Alongside new and used LPs, the shop carries 45s, CDs, 8-tracks, cassettes, and music DVDs, plus books, magazines, T-shirts, record-cleaning products, and general music memorabilia. That breadth reads less like a boutique concept and more like the accumulated inventory of a shop that never threw anything useful away.
The genre strength — 60s and 70s rock, Latin, world, psych, jazz — points to a collector base that has shaped the buying over decades rather than a single owner's taste imposed from the start. Out-of-print and collectible titles surface regularly, which is part of why serious collectors treat a visit as worth the stairs even without knowing what they'll find that day.
Record Store Day and the rest of the calendar
Record Store Day is the one occasion documented as genuinely crowded, with customers packing the small room shoulder to shoulder. Given how tight the space is on an ordinary day, that single fact says something about how differently the shop feels the rest of the year, when the same square footage presumably holds far fewer people at once.
The shop opened in 1981 under founder Richard Ulloa and is now run by owner Evan Chern, making it Miami's oldest independent record store still operating. At its peak the business grew to multiple Miami locations and even a Gainesville outpost; what remains on Bird Road is the one that lasted.
The strip plaza around it
The shop is sandwiched between an Asian spa and a travel agency, sitting above a pharmacy at ground level — a lineup of small, unglamorous businesses typical of Bird Road strip plazas built decades before the corridor's newer development. Nothing about the exterior signals a destination shop; it reads as one more tenant in an ordinary commercial block near the Palmetto Expressway.
That anonymity is arguably the point. A shop built around deep, alphabetized crates of out-of-print vinyl does not need street presence to draw the people who already know what they're after — it needs forty years of word of mouth among collectors, which is closer to what actually happened here.
Practical notes
The shop is at 9274 SW 40th St, on Bird Road near the Palmetto Expressway, on the second floor of a strip plaza reached by a narrow cement stairway — there is no ground-level entrance. Stock is filed alphabetically rather than by genre, so browsing without a specific title in mind takes patience. The business buys, sells, and trades vinyl, CD, and cassette collections in addition to selling from its regular stock, and it also carries 8-tracks, music DVDs, books, magazines, and memorabilia. Record Store Day is the one confirmed date when the room gets genuinely crowded, so first-time visitors hoping for a quiet browse may prefer another day. Standing weekly hours and parking details are not confirmed, so it is worth checking before making the trip out.
Tags: #MiamiRecordStore #VinylMiami #Kendall #WestMiamiDade #BirdRoad #RecordStoreDay #UsedVinyl #RareVinyl #IndependentRecordShop #CrateDigging #MiamiHiddenGems #VintageRecords #MiamiDadeHistory
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Ask Karpo first
Ask Karpo whether today looks like a Record Store Day-level crowd or an ordinary quiet afternoon before making the climb up the stairs on Bird Road. It is also worth asking whether the genre or era you're chasing tends to surface more in the shop's used bins or its newer stock, given how the alphabetical layout mixes both together.
