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The Loft 1970 -

http://www.theloftnyc.com

Legendary New York private party, held since 1970 by David Mancuso.

David Mancuso: I was at Broadway and Bleeker and I started giving rent parties which basically it's still down to the same thing, to manage and afford a life-style, that's basically the goal, to have a good time. From 70-74. Then the building got involved with a dispute between the landlord and the tenants, I got caught in the middle and even though I've always been a safety nut with two means of egress and so forth I didn't have a C of O for what I was doing, I don't know if there was a definition of what I was doing anyway, but rent parties were legal. But I was living in a building that was lofts that you weren't really supposed to be living in anyway, you picked up the beds, hid the refrigerator, you know, that kind of thing, but anyway, I had to leave there. Well I didn't have to leave here,I had to stop what I was doing, and I moved to Prince street, 99 Prince Street, or else I'd still be there, I'm sure I'd still be there. It's interesting, it was a much smaller place, more intimate, when I moved to Prince street it was like a gymnasium. I moved to 99 Prince street, I was there for eleven years, and then I moved to [X]st, got the building in 82, and in '84 I moved over. It was rough, I lost a lot of business, because in those days people didn't go past 1st Avenue, 2nd Avenue. So that's it, 1 2 3.

Basically R and B, what they called R and B. Anything that was danceable, it's hard to categorize individually. The crossover music was there. Also there was the influence of stuff like the Stones, Zeppelin, Brian Auger, groups like that, there was a good amount of crossover music, it certainly wasn't looked at as disco. [Then] disco happened. I think part of what happened was the twelve inch came in. Deejays would take a record like Scorpio which has a nice little drum thing in the middle, and take two forty fives and they would keep going back and forth and they would expand the time on the thing. And that became the twelve inch.