Walter Meyer recounted his weekend in New York, and mentioned purchasing
Simpson's 9th Symphony at the Lincoln Center branch of Tower Records...

I think you were luck to find any Simpson at all at Tower.  Following
Tower's attempt to get the smaller labels to wait for payment, they
removed all of Hyperion's Simpson series from the shelves of their
Classical department (along with quite a lot of the other music that made
me interested in shopping there in the first place).  The other day, I
visited the Broadway Tower and found only Simpson's 9th (the first Simpson
Cd I have seen there for months).  A couple of recent posts here and on
rec.music.classical indicate that some people think Hyperion has removed
Simpson from its catalogue.  This isn't true.  The Quartets, Symphonies
1-10 and all the other CDs in the series are still available, though you
may have to go directly to the distributor to get hold of them.

What this will do to the chances of Hyperion recording the 11th Symphony
(the only Symphony they havn't released) I don't know.

What happened to all those CDs? It turns out they shifted them in bulk over
to the outlet store (where the old Tower Books used to be on Laffayette).

So Walter, as the silver lining to this particular cloud, if you want cheap
Simpson CDs, next time you are in New York, check out the Tower outlet.
Right now you can get them for $6-8!

best wishes,
Andy Jackson