Atlantic Records Studios — Aretha Franklin, New York

Atlantic Records at 1841 Broadway in New York City was where Aretha Franklin's career was transformed. She had spent six frustrating years at Columbia Records, her extraordinary talent constrained by production choices that did not suit her, before signing with Atlantic in 1966. Producer Jerry Wexler took her to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, for her first sessions — the recordings that produced 'I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)' in January 1967 — and then continued the work at Atlantic's own New York studios. The run of recordings she made for Atlantic between 1967 and the early 1970s is one of the greatest sustained bodies of work in the history of American popular music.

Wexler's production approach with Franklin was to give her material she could inhabit completely and then stay out of the way — to trust the voice and the gospel instincts and the extraordinary musicianship rather than directing them. The results were immediate and historic: 'Respect,' 'Chain of Fools,' 'Natural Woman,' 'Think,' 'Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,' 'I Say a Little Prayer' — a sequence of recordings released between 1967 and 1968 that established Franklin as the definitive voice of her era and that redefined what a soul record could be. Nine Grammy Awards followed, along with a cultural authority that extended far beyond the music industry.

The Atlantic Records offices on Broadway are no longer at the original address, and the company has been through several ownership changes since the independent label era of the 1950s and 1960s. The building at 1841 Broadway has been repurposed. Atlantic's legacy in American music — as the label of Ray Charles, Ruth Brown, the Drifters, Led Zeppelin, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and Aretha Franklin — is without parallel in the history of the recording industry, and the Broadway address was the physical centre of that legacy during its most creative period.