Roland Store NYC opening party, October 10, 2026. Photograph by Sascha Brodsky.
For a few hours on Saturday evening, the Meatpacking District felt like it was 1995 again.
The occasion was a party celebrating the opening of Roland’s new flagship store on West Fourteenth Street. Under purple and electric-blue lights, a crowd of musicians, downtown hipsters, and assorted music obsessives mingled among synthesizers and drum machines. The atmosphere was somewhere between a nightclub and a particularly well-equipped recording studio.
The music had the insistent, electronic pulse of an old-fashioned club night. Guests circulated through the showroom while Roland keyboards sat within tempting distance of anyone inclined to revisit a youthful ambition to become a musician. The exposed ductwork and industrial ceilings added to the time warp. One half expected someone to start handing out flyers for a rave in an abandoned warehouse.
Roland, the Japanese manufacturer behind some of the most influential electronic instruments of the past half-century, had officially come to the neighborhood. Its new store, at 414 West Fourteenth Street, occupies 3,740 square feet, although on Saturday the musical equipment seemed almost incidental to the socializing.
The Meatpacking District has undergone several transformations since its clubland heyday, most of them involving increasingly expensive real estate. For one evening, though, the old neighborhood appeared to have staged a small comeback. There were synthesizers everywhere, and nobody seemed particularly interested in shopping.
Photograph by Sascha Brodsky.
