I'll say that with a qualifier: Tower was at one time a friendly chain to the alternative media. Many of their stores had huge newstands and a few had excellent bookstores. Tower helped many indie publishers find an audience and probably helped quite a few alternative political magazines stay in business.
There are no Tower outlets in the Kansas City area. I frequented Tower at their locations in Washington, DC and I always made a stop at their remainder store in downtown San Francisco. In D.C., I most often visited the Tower store on the George Washington U. campus. I also made some trips out to their store in Rockville, MD. The Rockville location was a large store and had a book selection that topped some of the indie bookstores in Washington. The downtown location was a bit smaller, but it had a good newstand and a decent book selection. That changed around 2000, when the downtown store started scaling back their alternative books for more music-related books. The magazine selection started becoming more mainstream too.
The thing that most people will miss about Tower is the depth of their music selection. This is of no interest to me, because I've long hated Tower for their price-gouging. I was never one of those people who collected record albums, nor am I a big live music fan. I'm a book guy. But Tower was an example of why the record industry screwed itself. A sometime music buyer such as myself just stopped buying CDs. Even when I had a professional job, I couldn't afford to spend $15-17 on a CD. I couldn't even think about buying more than one CD at a time. Tower was like a big candy store where the penny candy is priced at $50/pound. Yes, Tower had a diverse, deep selection, but who could afford CDs at those prices?
Tower at least had those listening stations where you could listen to tracks off of albums. This was useful to those of us who can't stand commercial music radio. I would have bought more CDs if I knew something more about more artists. I'm not going to plunk $17 down on a CD if I've only heard one song from the artist, or more often, have never heard anything by the artist.
These are some reasons why I'm happy that files-sharing is hurting record stores and the music industry. I have little sympathy for a whining bunch of greedy rich people.
On a positive note, it looks like the anarchist bookstore in Philadelphia, Wooden Shoe Books, is going to outlast the Tower around the corner on South Street. This is gratifying for several reasons, one of them being that that Tower store had a practice of sending "spies" over to the anarchist bookstore to see what they were selling and displaying.
As Chumbawamba might put it, Tower was all about finding ways to turn rebellion into money.
BTW, people might be interested in reading more of my thoughts over at Infoshop News about the announced demise of the Independent Press Association: http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=2007010321445519
Chuck