The vibe people get from stepping into Positively 4th Street Records is one found nowhere else in town.

“It’s very mellow, very chill,” said Susan Prignano, junior communications major who has worked at the store since April.

“We try to keep a hip, trendy store,” said Kirby Johnson, owner of Positively 4th Street Records. Johnson and his wife, Bridget, started the business 16 years ago. They named their store after the Bob Dylan song “Positively 4th Street.” Kirby thought the name was fitting for their store since it is located on the corner of 4th Street and Lincoln Avenue.

“Dylan is a songwriter that changed rock and roll to a certain degree,” Kirby said. “And with our location, it fit.”

The Johnsons started their store with Eastern students in mind.

“The store is pretty much built and designed to cater to Eastern Illinois University students,” Kirby said.

The store has evolved from selling only prerecorded music to now offering its customers fashion, jewelry, posters, collegiate clothing, movies, birthday cards, candy and even Yankee candles.

“As long as a small percent of students are buying music we will keep selling it because that’s what we started out as,” Kirby said. “Right now it’s not the center of what we do, but we keep the music because it’s the heritage of the store.”

Prerecorded music was a tough business to be in, Kirby said.

“In the last seven or eight years illegal downloading has decimated stores,” he said. “Some of the biggest chains that we never thought would go out of business are gone. We do so many things now that music is just an afterthought.”

Victor Ramos, finance major who has worked at Positively 4th Street Records for a year and a half, said posters are one of the store’s best-selling items.

“The posters are huge, especially at the beginning of the year. It’s hard to keep things in stock,” Ramos said.

A lot of items in Positively 4th Street Records are trendy and unique, but more important to the Johnson family are the changes the store has made.

“Out of everything I have done, what I am most proud of is when I expanded the business,” Kirby said.

The expansion happened three years ago.

“I had a dream of what this building would look like when it was built from the outside. We are all really proud of it,” Kirby said.

The building is more than just a store to Kirby.

“To me the building is very personal; my mother has helped, my brother, my father. It has been a family endeavor since day one,” he said. To this day, when I am sitting stopped at the light I am very proud to look at my building.”

The employees at the store feel the same.

“The store keeps getting better and evolving into something more than what it used to be,” Ramos said. “When I was a freshman here, the store was one floor, small and really condensed. Every summer we are doing something different. It’s getting bigger and better.”

But Positively 4th Street Records has not changed its trendy tone.

“We put a lot of money, time, energy and thought into the way the store looks on the outside and the inside; you could drop it into any trendy neighborhood in a large urban area and it wouldn’t feel out of place,” Kirby said.

More changes for the Johnsons are on the way. Currently, they are remodeling a building over on 18th Street that will be used for their embroidery and screen-printing.

“We fill orders for anything from the local little league to the Super Bowl,” Kirby said.

Eastern students can look for Positively 4th Street Records’ clothing on their new Web site in the next two or three weeks.

Kacey Haddock, senior sociology major, folds Eastern apparel at Positively 4th St. Records Tuesday afternoon.

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