Case #1 Video Store

·26 min·2 clips

Starlee Kine recalls trying to crack a mysterious safe in her grandparents' garage as a kid, sparking a lifelong obsession with unsolved puzzles.

Starlee Kine opens the episode with a meditation on her lifelong obsession with mysteries, from Amelia Earhart to D.B. Cooper to the smaller everyday puzzles of life, establishing that her show will tackle the kinds of mysteries that cannot simply be googled. Her friend Laura describes renting the movie Must Love Dogs from a small video store on Franklin Street in Tribeca one Sunday night in 2005 and returning it the next evening to find the store completely erased, the windows covered in brown paper and the interior empty. Kine travels to Tribeca in the rain to investigate, canvassing a diner, a parking garage, and a hotel concierge before being directed to Walkers, the oldest bar in the neighborhood. There she meets Linda, a waitress who has been in the neighborhood since 1976 and recalls a video store that closed after a basement flood ruined the inventory, though her memory places the closure roughly twenty years ago rather than 2005. Kine also meets Tom, a regular bar patron who loved the store and grew wistful in a way that led into a digression about Fellini and loneliness. A key break comes when the children's clothing store five doors down from the reported location turns out to have been their first customer, establishing the location clearly. The building's owner, John Rosenmiller, lives upstairs and confirms the store was called Tribeca Video, which he operated himself and closed when the internet made it financially unviable. He insists the store wound down over three months with visible inventory sales, contradicting Laura's account of sudden closure. When Kine reports back to Laura, Laura is relieved the mystery is solved but refuses to fully accept that she simply missed the closing signs, leaving open the question of whether John misremembers or Laura is a self-described harp liar.

As heard by us

A small video-store mystery that turns nostalgia, digression, and deadpan sleuthing into something tender.

A childhood memory of an old safe in a Palm Springs, California garage opens onto a smaller, stranger hunt: the name of the original video store and the people who still remember it.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a mystery that wanders like a good conversation.

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