Nightclubbing: The Loft

It is at minimum a faux pas, and at worst heresy, that a chronicle of the Loft’s evolution over the course of its 48 historic years should be presented as part of a series called “Nightclubbing.” The Loft was and continues to be many extraordinary things: a pioneering template of social inclusion and diversity on the dancefloor, an innovative celebration of audio fidelity, an exploration of sounds that became the root of modern dance music and an ongoing testimonial to the regenerative power of said canon. But it’s not a club. Its longtime host David Mancuso could not have been more explicit: The Loft is a party. One, it just so happens, without which the entire trajectory of modern nightlife is unimaginable.

It began simply enough as an informal gathering of friends in a then-neglected part of downtown Manhattan, where vacant industrial spaces were playgrounds for acid-abetted artistic expression and recreation. Though not a club, the Loft would go on to directly inspire iconic venues such as the Paradise Garage, the Gallery, Studio 54 and Chicago’s Warehouse. Though Mancuso was a self-described “musical host” who eschewed mixing, not a “DJ,” his taste and impeccable sense of environment was enormously impactful on the likes of Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, Nicky Siano and generations of DJs whose work in turn spawned entire musical movements. Mancuso’s stringent devotion to high-quality sound would make the names Klipsch, Koetsu and Levinson familiar to studious dancers and partygoers who’d never so much as plugged in an amplifier. His struggles with landlords and community boards for the right to host parties in his private residence foretold the now-familiar story of gentrification in New York City (and other cultural metropolises the world over) over a period of decades.

Much of this is well documented, and brilliantly so, via such invaluable projects as Nuphonic Records’ The Loft compilations, co-produced with Mancuso by Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy, and Tim Lawrence’s masterful tomes Love Saves the Day and Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor. However, on November 14, 2016, a chapter of the story of the Loft closed when David Mancuso passed away at age 72, at his home in New York City. In the aftermath, many have sought further perspective on the ways in which Mancuso and the party he hosted shaped the bigger picture of dance music history. Yet in doing so, an equally important and compelling, if sometimes overlooked, narrative thread re-emerged alongside the more celebrated one: how David Mancuso and the Loft indelibly affected individuals on a personal level, enriching and shifting the directions of their lives in ways they could have never predicted.

Many so-called “Lofties” are not public figures. They came to the dances from vastly different backgrounds and experiences. Some would eventually help hang balloons, prepare food or work the door. Others even played records there. A precious few have attended for virtually the entirety of the Loft’s existence – all the way back to that inaugural official dance on Valentine’s Day, 1970, christened “Love Saves the Day” – while others arrived relatively recently. But all understand the special nature of what they’ve experienced, and the importance that it continues to manifest itself in the world in some shape or form.

David Mancuso unequivocally believed that the party was bigger than any single individual, including himself – that the divestment of one’s ego was, in fact, paramount to any successful party. In that spirit, then, here is the story of the Loft told not in David Mancuso’s oft-documented words, but through the voices of others, a community built on and united by its love of music and the dance. Where everything, to quote a Loft classic, is fun, forever…

Part One: The Yellow Submarine Has Risen
Part Two: 99 Prince Street
Part Three: East Village Years
Part Four: Home Again
Part Five: Time For One More Baby

Part One: The Yellow Submarine Has Risen

Tina Magennis

My first experience with the Loft was before it was the Loft. I had met David in 1968-’69 through mutual friends. This person knew somebody who knew somebody and we ended up going to David’s loft on Broadway.

David Liu

647 Broadway, which is in NoHo at Bleecker and Broadway, was an old loft building that probably dates back, I think, pre-1850ish – something like that. That building actually had a very interesting history. Way back in the late 1800s there was a café [Pfaff’s] on the street level and it was kind of a hangout.

By the late ’60s it was a building that was, of course, illegal to live in. Just about everybody who lived in a loft was an artist. I was a filmmaker and lived on the top floor. It’s a five-floor walk up, and David was on the second floor.

Tina Magennis

They were just house parties. It was like, “Hey, it’s Saturday night. Let’s see if David wants company,” and people would just go over there. There might be 10 or 15 people. In those years, if you were going to go out to dance the night away, so to speak, New York just had regular-type nightclubs. So if you knew a lot of fashion people, or a lot of gay people, or was somebody who was interested in the arts – that kind of thing – you didn’t want to go to a fancy nightclub, to have to wear a suit and a tie, which was required.

David had a wonderful soundsystem and he liked to play music. We’d go there to enjoy David’s music and dance in his loft space. At the end of a night – because we would spend the whole night at his place – we would collect some money and somebody’d go off to a grocery early in the morning and bring food back and cook it. Then, as time went on, David would pass around a regular school notebook, and we’d write our names and addresses and phone numbers and say, “OK. Call me if you’re going to have another party. We’ll come.” It all began that way.

I don’t quite remember how it transitioned. I just know that they started to do the [formal] parties. He used to use the phrase, “The yellow submarine has risen.”

David Liu

It became very quickly a destination spot. It was, I think, really the first of its kind – a dance party, DJed kind of [private] event place that had never happened before. That was how we [his neighbors] noticed this incredible phenomenon.

Nicky Siano

I grew up in Sheepshead Bay. My brother had just moved into an apartment and I’m at a party with all these straight people. Well, straight people are much cooler today than they were at that time in Brooklyn, New York. Brooklyn is a very cool place now. It was really different back then. You didn’t want to be caught dead in Brooklyn.

Anyway, I go to my brother’s party and these people are all getting drunk or whatever, smoking weed. And the music is not very interesting, and my friend Robin’s going, “Put on some of your records, put on some of your records.” So I start putting on the records. We were getting up and dancing and this chick comes out of my brother’s bedroom and says, “Hi, I’m your brother’s new girlfriend. You like this music? I’m taking you to a place that you’re going to love called the Loft.”

Fred Flores

It was a very innocuous, kind of anonymous-looking entrance. There was absolutely no indication there was a party there, but if you knew about it, you knew about it.

Tina Magennis

When you’d come up the street, you could almost start to hear the music. You’d go through the door. There was always a line. You would have to walk up two flights of stairs, and at the platform before you would enter the Loft was a small desk, and the gentleman at the door was Steve Abramowitz.

Mark Riley

David’s right-hand guy, and the guy who vetted people as you came in, was Steve Abramowitz. Steve was a very – how best do I put this? – taciturn individual. Didn’t smile much, didn’t talk much, because his job was to make sure that everybody who came in was invited.

David Felton

I was introduced to David three days before the first official dance at the Loft. When I get to the Loft, I didn’t have an invitation in my hand. I had to go up the stairs where Steve Abramowitz was, and he sent someone upstairs to ask David, was I invited? They came out of the door and hollered down, “David Felton’s in the in-crowd!” I heard this crowd on the stairs say, “Oooooh.”

As soon as you open the door to the party, there’s a bubble machine with bubbles coming out. There was helium balloons floating all over the place with paper streamers hanging from them. The place was packed. Somebody handed me a tambourine as soon as I went in there.

Fred Flores

It was a small room, it wasn’t huge, and the dancefloor was sort of off to the side, facing the street. There was a real intimacy to it, which was really wonderful.

Tina Magennis

It was quite a tight environment because there was just so many people, and if you couldn’t move with the rhythm of the entire group of people, you could not move. As you came in, if you went towards your right, you would go towards what was more of a living space. There were two sort of [elevated] spaces that were built-in that were used as sleeping spaces. People would sit on the ladders [to the sleep spaces] if they weren’t dancing. Underneath it is where David’s DJ booth was – or music booth, I should say, I know he didn’t like that term – where he played music from. There was a small window that he would look out of to see the crowd.

Frankie Knuckles

And when you peek in there, David Mancuso looked like Jesus, literally. All you saw was his dark curly hair and his piercing eyes and the beard. And he would have a flashlight between his legs and his headphones.

Nicky Siano

I went into the room and David was behind the window over there and I was dancing with Robin and all of a sudden there was a peak, the bright white lights went on and every light went off except a little lamp and we’re still dancing and I’m going, “Wow, this is really cool!” Then there was another peak and that lamp faded out, it just dimmed out and I say, “Who controls the little fucking lamp in the corner?!” It wasn’t about someone just playing records, it was about creating atmosphere and creating a kind of feeling within the room.

Vince Aletti

I heard about the Loft through a group of friends, some of whom were would-be DJs, mostly gay black guys from Chicago and their New York friends, men and women, gay and straight. I wasn’t used to staying up until midnight in order to go out to some place, so they had to convince me. But once they did, it was like nothing I’d ever done before. It was exciting to go to a place where almost every record I heard was completely new and great. So all I wanted to do was write down all the titles: “What is this?”

Eventually I would go at 12, sometimes 11:30, and hang out with David in the booth, because I loved hearing the music that started out the night. And some of my favorite music was David’s early records. He would play jazz, environmental things, very loose. He would create this whole atmosphere as people were coming in, before they started dancing. These oddball things that he would discover, that were mostly jazz-fusion records, or international world music cuts. Records that didn’t have any lyrics for the most part, but were just chill-out or warm-up records. And I loved that kind of stuff, and it was great to see how David set the mood.

Little by little, the music would get more rhythmic and more danceable and people would start dancing. I loved seeing the whole theater of the Loft get underway. It was like being at a play before the actors had started performing.

Tina Magennis

It was always interesting to me, especially in that period of time, where people would say, “Well, what kind of music does he play?” And you could never really describe it because David played a bit of everything. If it was good music, he played it. You know, you could get sort of an Afro-Cuban beat in some songs. He would play Santana. I have memories of him playing [the Rolling Stones’] “Let It Bleed.”

Once the disco sort of stuff came along, people would say, “Oh, it’s dance music. It’s disco,” and you would have to say, “No, it’s not disco.” Not that disco is good, bad or indifferent – but David’s music was not that.

David Felton

There was really no place that we could dance like we did at the Loft. What made the Loft different was what we heard. In other words, the music. We wasn’t just out there dancing when you heard a “Girl You Need A Change Of Mind…”

Tina Magennis

“Girl You Need A Change Of Mind” – as soon as you heard the first two notes of Eddie Kendricks, that was the end. It was absolutely magical.

David Felton

When you heard [Main Ingredient’s] “Happiness Is Just Around The Bend.” When we heard [the O’Jays’ “Family Reunion”]: “Unity, we must have unity.” When you have a party where the whole party is singing and dancing and loving each other. It was the closest thing you could get to heaven on earth. You were exhilarated.

Alex Rosner

I was introduced to David by a mutual friend. He said I should stop by and look at his club, because I could be of some service to him. Which I was. I rebuilt his system for him, and made his sound much better. He had what was basically a home system. When I got through with it, it was a disco system… It was the way it was configured. I put in Klipschorn speakers and I bi-amplified it; tri-amplified it. And at that time that was something new that wasn’t done.

David Felton

Now I hear them talking about the tweeters and the woofers, but that didn’t make the Loft. We didn’t even know [anything about] speakers. We was only interested in what came out of the speakers.

Alex Rosner

No question about it. The soundsystem is just a tool in the hands of the artist. But without the tool, the artist can’t do too much. The tool in the hands of a lousy artist, is a lousy machine. You need both to make it successful.

When I saw the excitement and energy there, it was very inspirational to me… I remember ripping off my shirt and dancing. I loved the music. It was the real stuff. It was terrific, and at that time I was in-between wives, so it was the right time.

John “Jellybean” Benitez

I went to the earliest incarnation of David Mancuso’s Loft, and was blown away by how mesmerized the entire audience was by what he was doing. He would play a song and it would end and they would clap, stay on the dancefloor and then the next song would start. Every once in a while songs overlayed each other. Not beat to beat, but kind of smooth. One was fading out, one was fading in. I never had seen an audience that was so responsive and so connected to someone that was playing music… how everyone was so aware of his presence.

Frankie Knuckles

On the strength of that alone, that’s where I learned it’s about what you play, not how you play.

David Felton

When a slow record would come on, they would turn out all the lights. Whoever was in front of you, you danced with them. It didn’t matter. You didn’t check to see if it was a male [or] girl.

Tina Magennis

I would say the crowd was mostly gay. Probably at least 60% if not a little more, and then everybody else you could imagine that was in New York at the time. There were women. There were all walks of life. All races. There was just a bit of everybody. The commonality was that everybody just wanted to be there.

Vince Aletti

The crowd was completely mixed, racially and sexually, and there wasn’t any velvet rope or any sense of someone being more important than anyone else. And it really felt like a lot of friends hanging out. David had a lot to do with creating that atmosphere. Everybody who worked there was very friendly.

David Felton

Sheila Boyd would be in there cooking all kinds of good food, like collard greens and chicken.

Frankie Knuckles

It was a real kitchen as kitchens go – the stove, the oven, the refrigerator – and there were people back there working. They had this big garbage can with all this orangeade that was made fresh by hand and that everybody drank, or water, this that and the other.

Vince Aletti

There were people putting out buffets of fruit and juice and popcorn and all kinds of munchies. It felt like going to someone’s house party, yet you were completely welcome. It was very hot and very crowded, but that also made everybody feel more connected. I don’t remember anybody there pushing and shoving.

David Felton

The bathroom was a unisex bathroom. If you had to go to the bathroom, you went in there with everybody else. There was no “peek and hide” and closing doors, you just went to the bathroom. We’d just sit in there laughing and talking. You couldn’t get away from nobody.

David Liu

The whole building practically pulsed, jumped with the music – especially the bass beats. David had these huge theater speakers down there. You could really barely sleep. In fact, his neighbor above him on the third floor actually eventually just had to move out on those nights because it was impossible, he lived right above that noise.

Also, we could hardly get into our own building because it had a door on the ground floor and a very narrow staircase leading up to the five floors. On those nights we had to sort of just push our way in to get up to our floor. I don’t know how we lived through it, but we did.

I had to pass his doorway every time I went up and down the stairs. One day the door was open. It was open that way for a while, and I think that people came and took things, so the place became more and more empty. I found him in there one day just really catatonic.

I think at one point he was probably hospitalized or something, but he wasn’t there. I went in and the place was empty and I looked around and I saved his tapes. There was I think a carton of cassette tapes he made. If you’ve heard those tapes, nobody did mixes like that. He was really original. I saved that for him and some other stuff. There was a mirror that he prized, so I took it all upstairs. When he came back I gave those back to him.

David was a sweet person. I wouldn’t say he was exactly a good neighbor, because the party made our lives hell. But David really, I think, in some sense appreciated the fact that we actually put up with it and allowed it. Despite the noise, the parties were actually very benign, because the people who went there were all kinds of hippies and families.

David Felton

We was all in one group. It was one thought. It was united. We were exactly one family in love. When I came in, I came in clapping my hands. There wasn’t nobody there that I didn’t hug and pay attention to. I didn’t allow people to stay in the corner all by themselves with nobody to talk to them. I made a habit of seeing who doesn’t have a friend. At the original Loft, 647, I never missed a night.

Fred Flores

It was a weekly ritual. It was just part of my life on an ongoing basis. It wasn’t like I planned it. It was just, that’s what we did. We’d get dressed up to look fabulous and get stoned and get high and go out and party. We used to go to the Loft and go to Tina’s house in Brooklyn and sleep over. We all sort of slept in a communal bed, and we’d do that almost every weekend. We slept at each other’s houses all the time. Our lives were very, very communal at that time. It was totally normal. It’s like, live with whoever was around.

Mark Riley

The parties weren’t about sex. They were about the elasticity of time. People stopped paying attention to what time it was, whether it was daylight or dark outside. It didn’t matter. You’d never see a clock in the wall.

Tina Magennis

In those years the last song of the night was always Nina Simone singing “Here Comes The Sun.” Coming out of there early in the morning just after being there all night and seeing the sun come up – I know I keep saying the word “magical,” but that’s what it was.

Frankie Knuckles

It was really like home for me.

Part Two: 99 Prince Street

Tina Magennis

When the Loft on Broadway finally had to close and David found the space on Prince Street, again it was a neighborhood of just big industrial spaces that nobody else wanted and the landlords were just happy to rent them.

Louis “Loose” Kee

There was two entrances. There was a Prince Street side and a Mercer Street side. The Mercer side was like going downstairs into the basement of a bodega. You go through this door, and you go down this spiral staircase, and then there was a ticket booth like in an old movie theater. And people would show their invitations and pay the fee. The price was like $4.99, and each year it would go up. They would have a jar full of pennies, and after you paid your admission, you got your penny. It was like a traditional kind of thing.

Mark Riley

The physical space was distinct in a number of ways because, of course, there was an upstairs and a downstairs. Upstairs the ceiling was high. The booth was elevated up above the floor. There were balloons all over the place and then there was parachuting over the top. I had never seen anything like that in a space before.

Louis “Loose” Kee

You have lights underneath it, so the lights would make the parachute and the balloons glow. So you’d have this kind of heavenly look to what’s going on.

Mark Riley

It made the room shimmer in a way that most other rooms did not.

Ernesto Green

It was just mesmerizing. It would make you feel like a kid again.

Mark Riley

[When I first went to the Prince Street Loft] I’m looking at the placement of the speakers, the Klipschorns, and I was like, “These things are gigantic.” What he did was stack two, one on the top of the other. The sound was just so extraordinary. I’ve heard loud soundsystems. The Loft wasn’t loud, [the sound] was just so well defined.

Alex Rosner

A tweeter-array is where you have a tweeter facing north, south, east and west. Basically you have four of them in some kind of enclosure so that all four are mounted like a chandelier above the dancefloor. And that idea was David’s. I thought it would be too much high frequency, but I was wrong. It was so high up, the more you have up there the better.

Ernesto Green

It just hit you wherever you’re at on the dancefloor. It wasn’t overpowering. It just made you feel good, whether you could dance or not. I just remember walking through the crowd and bouncing along with the rhythm of the music.

Nicky Siano

David definitely was a purist. He said to me once, “The turntables should plug into the amp, the amp should plug into the speakers, and nothing should be in between that line. No mixer, nothing.” Originally he didn’t have a mixer, he had a box that would go back and forth. I remember that his cue was not on a headphone, but was on speakers in the booth. It was very, very, very futuristic. He started going to the moving coil cartridges, and then he went to all Mark Levinson amps. David went really far into the essence of sound.

Mark Riley

Downstairs was a slightly more claustrophobic space because the ceiling was much lower. He had speakers downstairs, they were playing music down there. The downstairs was where the refreshments were. The restrooms were there.

Douglas Sherman

More than anything, you essentially knew you were in someone’s home. It wasn’t a club. I remember on one occasion being in the bathroom and I saw David’s toothbrush on the side of the sink. I’m like, “Yeah. This is really somebody’s home.”

Mark Riley

Wolfie, his cat, used to roam all over the place.

Ernesto Green

It was set up with a lot of antiques – chairs, couches around the place. It just gave you a feeling of being home.

Louis “Loose” Kee

I was a Long Island kid who started dancing in clubs as a hobby, as a way of getting away from being bullied. For a kid from Long Island, going to the city looked like you were going to the Emerald City in The Wizard Of Oz. It wasn’t about the drinking or the smoking, it was about just the atmosphere, the dancing and being able to be an individual.

When I walked in [for the first time], I saw this guy on the other end of the room, standing with his legs spread, and baggy pants. Latino. He had on some Capezios, a shredded T-shirt.

He stood there with his legs spread. I saw this guy coming from the other end [of the room], running towards him very, very fast. As he ran towards this guy like he was getting ready to hit him, [he] went into a forward split. Not a side split, but a forward split… and bent his head down so he slid through this guy’s legs. I was like, “Wow, where am I at?!”

I thought my dancing was good. But now I realized, this is another level. I’d been in my own little world, but this is where the big boys hang out.

Will Socolov

My father was a lawyer and he did work for David Mancuso. I would go to the Loft a lot as a young kid because of David’s relationship with my dad. It was magical for me. That is how I got my musical education of dance music.

I remember being near Larry Levan playing with the light and hanging out. I remember guys with hair down their back wearing plaid shirts, dungarees and work boots with a girl with like one of those hippie dresses and they are just freestyle dancing, jumping around while David is playing these incredible dance songs. Next to kids from uptown or Brooklyn or whatever, and then next to other people who were gay. Although predominantly gay early on, that was not his M.O. – like, “This is a gay club and we don’t want straight people in.” David was never that way. His philosophy was that this was like Our Gang. That was the picture on your [Loft invitation] card. That was his thing.

Ernesto Green

We had a crew of guys – we all worked at Yankee Stadium during the summer months and we lived all over the city. A friend of mine said there was this great place downtown that we needed to experience. It’ll be much different than anything we’ve ever experienced in life. I was young at that point, so willing to try anything. So we met on Prince and Mercer one Saturday night in May of 1975. That’s where my first Loft experience happened.

I grew up in Bed-Stuy. Not Bed-Stuy as it is today. Bed-Stuy as it was back in 1975, which was basically black or Hispanic. The only time I dealt with white folks or people of other backgrounds was at school or at work. From the first time [I went to the Loft] people were friendly, which kind of took me aback. I was shy at that time. It helped me come out of my shyness in some ways, and it taught me a lot about people, a lot about diversity. You know, when you come up in a neighborhood where you basically only hear negative [things] about people from other cultures, and then you start meeting people from other cultures and they’re on the same level as you are, it’s eye-opening.

It was a very spiritual experience with the music, with the people. [I started going] every Saturday like church. Every single Saturday for probably the first five years.

David Felton

The Loft was my balance. I was working two jobs – at the typographical union, [and at] the New York Post in the composing room, pulling press. In those days they had Linotype machines, which was running on hot lead. Nobody else wanted to do hot lead. That’s how dangerous it was. I was the first black [person] in a blue-collar position [at the Post]. There were 14 of us and I was the only black. They used to go down at six o’clock in the morning and buy 13 hot rolls and coffee, everybody but me. They did all kinds of little things like that the whole time I was at the Post trying to see if they could upset me.

The hell I was going through at the New York Post was mitigated by going to the Loft. I knew whatever hell I went through during the week, Saturday night was coming. And on Saturday night I’m gonna dance. I’m gonna scream. I’m gonna holler. I’m gonna hug. I’m gonna love.

Donna Weiss

It was just a release of stress to go dancing. I was going through a divorce and had three children, so I was basically bringing them up by myself, and that was quite stressful. I had started a business prior to my divorce, so I was working from my home. At that time they didn’t have daycare like they do now. It was very therapeutic for me.

Elyse Stefanishin

I was getting divorced and [going to the Loft] opened my world to dating people that I probably wasn’t even meeting prior to that. It really expanded my horizons and my circle of friends on so many levels. I was teaching school. The people I met there were social workers, photographers, creative people, lawyers, probably a couple of physicians, carpenters.

Mark Riley

No matter how out of kilter your life may have been – if you had marital problems, family problems, whatever – there was still the Loft.

As I got to know some of the folks, there were people, for example, who had come out in their families as gay and were thrown out of their houses. Told, “Don’t ever come back here again until you stop that.” They felt all alone. This was the one place they could come on a Saturday and feel like they had a family, feel that they weren’t alone. In those days, that was golden for people, absolutely golden.

Elyse Stefanishin

I remember one particular person, his first name was Paul. Paul used to like to come and wear a skirt and beads. Normally I think during the day he didn’t dress that way, but that was how he felt comfortable. He liked to dance with a big skirt. Nobody would blink an eye, it was perfectly normal. To everybody he was just part of the crowd.

One of the reasons that I became so devoted to the Loft is I always thought, “If this were a microcosm of the world, the world would be so different and so fabulous,” because that’s the way I envisioned people should be. To me, that’s my idea of the way society should look. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look that way, but within the Loft it does.

Josie Ritondo

I was a single parent. I was young. I left my home [in Mexico] when I was 15 years old because of difficulties in my personal life with my family. I started going to the Loft in 1976. I didn’t even know how to speak English, and here I am in this atmosphere with all these artists and it didn’t matter, because music is universal. When you’re dancing, when you use music, you don’t need any language. The Loft to me was a sanctuary.

Six months after going to the Loft the first time, the person that took me there said, “You know what? I’m going to sponsor you so you could become a member. Why don’t you come on a Wednesday when they’re decorating and I’ll sign you up?”

To my surprise, David already knew who I was. I never met David. But David IDed people by their energy, by the way they danced, honestly. “Oh, I remember you – you come early and you do this, and dah-dah-dah.” He said, “Well, now that I know that you’re a single mother, I want you to bring your children.”

I started bringing my children. Luis was four years old and Pedro was two, so I started bringing them to decoration time.

Luis Vargas, AKA Loft Kid Luis

So we go to this place. They open a door and it’s just wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, as far as the eye can see balloons of every size. And not just balloons, but there was stuff inside the balloons. So, being a kid and looking up into what were clouds of balloons, you’d see the Star Trek Enterprise, you’d see a hot-air balloon, you see a mermaid or a star or a Santa Claus figure. That first image of walking in and seeing all of those balloons is still stamped in my brain.

We figured out that the floor was like a bowling alley: super slick and super smooth, and waxed every week. So, you could take a run from one side of the room, and slide into balloons. It was a swimming pool of balloons, the sound of the balloons rolling over you.

David used to love to tell jokes. And it was some of the corniest stuff on the planet but some of the funniest. He loved to do knock-knock jokes, and wife jokes, and priest jokes. You’d order his favorite Italian food from the joint down the block, and just sit around and bullshit, and talk about the alien signals coming through your fillings and why this frequency was this way, and that frequency was that way, and the celestial this, and the celestial that, and it was funny.

I remember that first day my mom had to drag us out. We were trying to move in. We were like, “You are pulling us away from the light!” Like, hands on the floor, scratching the pavement, pulling us out. “Come, we got to go.” “No, I want to live in here! I want to move in! Forget that!”

Josie Ritondo

I can’t say I brought them every week, but once in a while – once a month, once every other month – I would bring them to the Loft. It was their favorite thing to do. Then it started turning into, alright, it’s your birthday: I’m going to bring you to the Loft on a Sunday morning – because if you come at seven, eight o’clock in the morning, you still have a whole lot of hours to go, sometimes to two o’clock in the afternoon.

I started bringing the kids on special mornings like on Christmas, on Easter, on their birthday, special occasions like that. Everybody started getting used to seeing my kids. They became a part of the community.

Luis Vargas, AKA Loft Kid Luis

My five-year-old memory is just a splash of color and feeling. But the later memory, around nine and ten, you’re that awkward kid, you’re kind of like, “Alright, this is cool, but what’s going on here?”

There were certain sections of the room with pillows and stuff that we would crash out on, and my mom would leave to dance. Say, “Guys, watch my kids.” And it was understood that these are her kids and if anybody touches them, or that’s not supposed to be there… There’s going to be some problems. For four hours nobody was attending to us, we were able to do whatever we wanted. We were mischievous, collecting the wax from the candles to make a huge wax ball and just mess around. We really had no malice, and it was a room full of uncles and aunts. They all were struggling New Yorkers who appreciated having a weekend off, and appreciated that we were there as kids in the morning.

My mom was a good mom, so we weren’t going to every party. Some people complained, for sure. Sometimes people are not so appreciative of children at parties because they want to get high and get loose. It was the beginning of the nightlife in New York, pretty robust and rambunctious, and lots of shit going on.

Ernesto Green

You smelled the aroma of marijuana all through the place. Incense burning.

Vince Aletti

It’s hard for me to say [how much drugs played a part at the Loft] because I know I was smoking pot, but I was not particularly aware of what other people were doing. I didn’t have the sense that there were a lot of people out of control on drugs, like you saw at some clubs became later, when people were falling over themselves. I remember people smoking, but I don’t remember any obvious drug-taking.

David Felton

We all did acid.

Will Socolov

In the old days when you checked your coat, if they knew you you would open your mouth and someone put something in your mouth and you had a pleasant time. David had all kinds of interesting drugs… It was other really mellow psychedelics and stuff like that.

Tina Magennis

Unless you had your own little personal flask or something, it wasn’t where you must buy liquor. Alcohol makes people angry a lot and every weekend at David’s made people happy a lot. That’s an enormous difference.

Fred Flores

Of course, the drugs sort of gave you the energy to keep on going. I remember just getting in there and starting to dance and not stopping.

David Felton

We used to put a handkerchief over your mouth and spray this little bottle and it was like instant euphoria. It was like the poppers. At my birthday party that I had at the Loft, [one friend] was on one side, [another friend] was on the other side and they’re both popping poppers under my nostrils and [another] was spraying ethyl chloride in my mouth.

Most of the people were good. I don’t really remember people falling out or nothing. We were all mature people.

Mark Riley

It got to be like maybe seven to 7:30 in the morning at one party. This is during the Thai Stick craze. Thai sticks were considered the greatest weed ever. Steve Abramowitz and I were in the front room. I guess he had already finished work because by then, there was nobody coming in. Steve had a pile of Thai Sticks wrapped up in aluminium foil and he looks at me and he says, “I bet you can’t smoke one of them.”

I said, “How much do you want to bet?” He said, “Here is what we are going to do: I’m going to roll one, you are going to roll one, whoever stops smoking first wins.” I’m telling you, it was one of the most hilarious events I have ever experienced. Steve didn’t [usually ever] laugh, but we are going back and forth, back and forth. He is looking at me and I’m bursting out laughing. I’m looking at him, he is bursting out laughing. We laughed… It had to be almost an hour straight. It was just an only-at-the-Loft experience. That’s all I’m going to say about drugs at the Loft.

Tina Magennis

I think [hallucinogens] added to the experience there because you felt you were in a very safe haven. So if you were going to have acid, or some pot, or whatever it was, it was in a safe, loving environment. You didn’t feel like you were dealing with, you know, other people looking at you or any of that. You were just safe. So the experience that you could see the music in the air was even more magical. You could see the notes going by your eyes. It really was that way.

Louis “Loose” Kee

It enhanced [the experience] a lot of times. When we were coming off of the little bit of candy, [whatever] you want to call it, you’d lay down there, and you’d just crash out.

One time I woke up, the party was still going and everybody was still dancing, and all of a sudden I hear the song from West Side Story, “I like to live in America…” I was like, “Wow, he’s playing that?” Everybody started getting into character. Like, the girls would move their dresses like the little hot Latin girls, and the guys would be playing the West Side Story thing. We would just go at it.

I realized that [David] can tap into any mood you want to, and he could open up parts of you that you never experienced in any other place, even at home.

Danny Krivit

My first experience at the Loft was 1975 at Prince Street. I walk in and there’s this song playing that I didn’t quite recognize. Everybody downstairs knew it from the first chord and was running upstairs to it. As I got upstairs, I realized this was my current favorite song, but one that I was having a lot of problem playing in the places I played – “City, Country, City” by War.

I got so much flak for playing it. People would be like, “Leave that at home. What are you thinking?” I was starting to question my taste – maybe I don’t have a handle on this? When I went upstairs and I saw this explosion as it got to this busy part of the song, it was something I had never experienced in a club before that. This freedom of dance and really high energy. In all the years I went to the Loft, it was probably my peak experience, that moment. People going absolutely nuts for this record. It really affected my whole DJing career from that point. The idea of this music being that unusual and being so positive.

Francois Kevorkian

I became involved with producing and remixing and started bringing around acetates to the [Paradise] Garage and to the Loft to David, let’s say late ’78, early ’79. For whatever reason, a lot of what I was bringing became massive, massive records with the Prelude stuff. “I Hear Music In The Streets” by Unlimited Touch or the Strikers’ “Body Music” and on and on. It was just something absolutely incredible – being in the studio and then going to cut a quick acetate, and come to the Loft on Saturday. And, as I got to know David pretty well, he would just throw it on. It was just this amazing gratification of being able to hear what you did in the studio but with an audience right there, right then on a pure, clear, absolutely amazing soundsystem. I just don’t remember having that experience very often in many places.

Douglas Sherman

What totally made it different from the typical nightlife experience was, when you have DJs that are mixing, they tend to stay pretty synchronized with one beat throughout. What you begin to lose is the characteristics that distinguish one record from the next, and they all begin to sound similar, simply because you have this beat that the DJ is always adjusting the pitch for and keeping everything steady that way, whereas David didn’t pay any mind to that.

For example, a record like “Double Journey” by Powerline is actually a pretty fast-paced record, but it’s gentle at the same time. Then you have a record like “House Party” by Fred Wesley, and that’s a much slower record but unleashes such energy in the room, and he could go from one to the other.

Over time, I learned to come with a little piece of paper and take notes, because I was hearing things for the first time that weren’t necessarily new releases or anything. It was just that David had such an amazing ear for music and had already compiled such a variety of selections that it was just an amazing tapestry that he was creating each Saturday night. Just one amazing record after another.

Luis Vargas, AKA Loft Kid Luis

[At age] 10, 11 I figured out I love the music. I remember the day and the outfit clearly. I just started buying disco clothes, so I had my first cool polyester shirt with the big collar, and I had these funky sunglasses. My legs were going, my body was jumping around. And I remember dancing for like four to six hours with no stop, sweating my ass off because it’s a polyester shirt. My legs were wet down to my knees, and I was glorious.

That day “Loft Kid Luis” was born. I remember becoming that guy, and there’s been that person ever since. And the music always brings me back to that person.

Mark Riley

The one song that had the deepest emotional impact on me at the time [David] played it was Idris Muhammad’s “Could Heaven Ever Be Like This.” First of all, I knew Idris Muhammad as a jazz drummer. I didn’t know him as somebody that did club music. What was different about it for me was that he never used a snare drum in the entire piece. He used toms. I found that fascinating. His instrumentation was also extraordinary. He had a harp, he had brass, he had a guitar player who was really good. It was just one of those songs that was made for the Loft.

Later on it was [Sun Palace’s] “Rude Movements.” Again, the song that seemingly nobody else played. Larry Levan didn’t even play it at the Garage that often. But David played it at the Loft and people absolutely, drop-dead loved it. There were some other stuff during that same period. MFSB “Love Is The Message” – because David believed that. Once I got to know him I understood that for him, “Love Is The Message” was just like this song that kind of encapsulated his entire philosophy.

Ernesto Green

You would look at Dave and think he was very standoffish, because when he was into the music he was just into the music. Very seldom would he smile, but he would make sure everything was going good.

Tina Magennis

David was always a very kind of private person and it was hard to get him to say a lot. He was just a very quiet man. I remember one time he had said to me, “When I’m at the parties, I always make sure I wear black and stand against a black wall so people don’t know I’m there.”

Douglas Sherman

If you went up and made a request, he would play the record for the most part. If you had a question about the record that was just played, as long as he wasn’t actually in the middle of putting on a record, he would always accommodate. He was very friendly and gentle in his exchange with people that may have been complete strangers to him, but I felt a very welcoming spirit when I would ask.

Ernesto Green

Once I got to be friends with David sometimes I would come down and we’d have a barbecue. In the middle of the week we’d come down after work and hang out. Get to meet people and just started to know him. Started to know more about his background, how he was raised and everything. Then a lot of things really started making sense.

Elyse Stefanishin

The whole Loft concept – the balloons, the popcorn, the toys, everything was recreating a childhood that he may never have had, and making it a happy time. Because his childhood probably wasn’t all that happy.

Josie Ritondo

He never really talked about it unless you asked him. Like when I started learning how to speak English and expressed myself a little better. One day when we were in one of the barbecues when they decorated, I started asking him, “How did you ever get into this? Why you like so many balloons?” And then he started telling me about it.

He told me that his mother used to be into drugs and gave both [he and his sister] up because she couldn’t handle them. He said that he was growing up in this orphanage and one of the nuns, whenever she went out, she would go to the thrift shop and buy records. She would buy balloons and put balloons all over the place. Then she would play the records so she will make them dance. He said that he used to love to dance, used to dance with all of his friends and used to dance with the sister. She would have little snacks for them. And that was the creation of him wanting to grow up and [recreate those parties]. He said, “When I left the orphanage and I went on my own, as soon as I started having money on my own, getting jobs and things like, I started to buy records and started to buy my system. Then when I heard the Klipsch speakers and I started learning about it, that was it. I had to have them too.”

He said, “I started to create that atmosphere in my own home. It was a little party, and the little party started to get a little bigger by word-of-mouth, bigger and bigger where people started to support me where I didn’t need to go to work anymore. The money was enough for me to pay my rent to keep this going and it started to grow and grow and grow, and it created this. That’s how it came about.”

I said, “David, will you tell your story to somebody? Make them make a movie out of it. Do something with it. You’ve had such a fascinating life!” He’s like, “Well, if anybody is ever interested in me, yes.”

Luis Vargas, AKA Loft Kid Luis

At the Loft, holidays were special. Christmas actually was it. There was a Christmas tree that lived there 24/7, 365. But on Christmas, because David was associated with the record pool, there would be records wrapped underneath and people who came early would have the pick of the lit.

Ernesto Green

One time he had maybe 25 or more Christmas trees hung up upside down above the dancefloor.

Tina Magennis

They gave away toys at Christmas and one time they gave out a little frog snap toy. This little toy, to me, was precious. I remember being in a grocery store in Brooklyn and there was this little girl. She must have been about five and she saw me playing with it and she said, “What’s that?” I said, “Oh, my friend gave me this for Christmas and I really like it.” She says, “Is that all you got?” I was like, “Well, what did you get for Christmas?” She says, “I got a stereo.” And I thought, I have this little tiny thing which is so precious to me and someone else just could not see the value of it, you know?

Donna Weiss

The Loft was an underground thing. However, word gets out.

Ernesto Green

You never knew who you’d run into at the Loft. Celebrities would come, but it wouldn’t be a big thing. They were just there to party. Ashford & Simpson. Madonna before she became Madonna as we know her now. Grace Jones.

David Felton

Patti LaBelle was there. One night on Prince Street Eddie Murphy came in.

Donna Weiss

I don’t remember Eddie Murphy dancing. I just remember him standing there. It was kind of funny. SoHo was just starting to change from [being] a little slummy, and then you would see limos pulling up in front of the place.

Tina Magennis

The art community [in SoHo] was able to rent these big, big spaces. [But eventually] the art folks were starting to do better and they didn’t want us grungy kids hanging around going to dances [in the neighborhood]. Oh, gosh! Making noise in the night! So interesting.

Will Socolov

Even though it was many, many years ago, there were a lot of a very powerful people that didn’t like blacks or gays coming into their neighborhood on Saturday night. A lot of wealthy real estate people were beginning to develop SoHo.

Matter of fact, back then on the back page of the Village Voice there was a story. About a young black guy that came from, I don’t know, Maryland or somewhere, and he was like a Ph.D. candidate [and] he was gay. He ended up going to the Loft and then afterwards he went to the piers, where he either fell in the water or whatever it was. He got so stoned and he died. [The article originally appeared on the front page of the Soho Weekly News on April 10th, 1975, and was referenced in Vince Aletti’s Village Voice column “SoHo vs. Disco” published June 16th, 1975]

The powers that be tried to attach [that incident] to the Loft. They had to defend themselves against this. [Whenever] the police department came to raid them… It was harassment, it really was. The Loft had so many people that were against them they had a lawyer work at the front desk. Lawyers that worked at my father’s office worked at the front desk.

David Felton

The police and the fire department would come in there. I used to pretend like it was my birthday. I’d be so excited: “Ooh, they came to be with me!” Then I’d hug somebody and take the policemen and the firemen right on around in the circle, acting so shocked like, “Ooh, I didn’t know [we were doing anything wrong].” You know, and asking them out.

Mark Riley

The Department of Consumer Affairs held a hearing in Lower Manhattan about clubs and SoHo. It was an organization that really had a serious problem with the clubs down there, not just the Loft, but there were several others in the neighborhood. They wanted them out, period.

Having been to the Loft and being a reporter, I wanted to go see what these people had to say. I heard more nonsense about the Loft: “It’s full of drug abusers, it’s pimps,” it’s this, it’s that, it’s the other. I’m like, “Who are they talking about? What are they talking about?” It was a concerted effort, because those folks were actually occupying lofts illegally at the time, and they wanted to be made legal. As far as they were concerned that whole scene impeded their ability to do that.

They could see the neighborhood was going to eventually become the SoHo that we all know today. They really tried to run David out of the neighborhood. They were trying to classify David as a cabaret, which would require him to get a cabaret license. The whole situation hinged on the fact that if you were a [guest] of the Loft and you didn’t have enough money to get in, you could still come in as long as you wrote an IOU. When the Consumer Affairs Department heard that, they had to say, “Well, no. You don’t need a cabaret license.” That’s what kept the Loft going.

Elyse Stefanishin

Once David went through his whole court case and everything, they really couldn’t do anything. But the time came when he had to leave because of the building and the landlord.

Mark Riley

Leaving 99 Prince Street was a gut-wrenching experience for him.

Ernesto Green

He knew it was going to be challenging, but I don’t think he had the idea that it would be as challenging as it was.

Part Three: East Village Years

Mark Riley

The Loft then went to East 3rd Street between Avenues B and C. David owned the space. That was the final frontier for him. [Previously] he controlled most everything else about his environment, but he never owned the space.

Elyse Stefanishin

When David bought the building, it was heroin city. It was a beautiful theater and it had a marquee that was really nice out front, but the marquee ended up serving as a shelter for the heroin dealers. One of the first things he had to do was take down the marquee, which is really a shame, because it was a great part of the architecture. Then he had to take out all the seats from the theater and level the floor.

It was a long process, so he remained on Prince Street while all that was being done. Some months before he actually moved in, there was a city initiative to clean up that neighborhood from the heroin dealing. They did somewhat, but it was still not safe. He delayed his move as long as he possibly could. Then it came time where he really just had to get out of the building on Prince Street.

Our friendship grew deeper with the time I spent there. I would come down before he even opened the parties. I remember if I came down to see him at night on 3rd Street, I would have to stay overnight because you couldn’t safely get to public transportation and you couldn’t call a cab because they wouldn’t come. He needed people to support the Loft and I was there to help him in any way we could.

Ernesto Green

The block that he moved on was like nitroglycerin. Just waiting to explode. They had so much drug dealers, drug kingpins, gangs, a car theft ring on the same block. The gang members wanted to store cars inside David’s driveway.

Douglas Sherman

He really began to have a more challenging period, because about two-thirds of his following did peel off. It was a very difficult neighborhood for people at that time to want to venture into.

Ernesto Green

People were just petrified of that area, Alphabet City. We had a Loft shuttle that would pick people up from the subways and bring them over. This little school bus with balloons on it and the guy would pick them up from the F train, bring them over, and take the group back over to the subway, and continued all evening.

Elyse Stefanishin

He was determined to continue on and he was determined to assimilate into the neighborhood and he made friends with some of the characters who lived on his street. There was one kingpin drug dealer that he got friendly with. David was able to reach out to people of all sorts. He was very accepted by the neighborhood, which was unusual. They didn’t break people into the fold that easily.

Luis Vargas, AKA Loft Kid Luis

There were times when they would come into the Loft, and we’d have to deal with people with guns. But David had this great ability to be a politician and to be able to calm them down, and be able to get them to relax. Because it’s like going to the land of daisies and trying to stomp on the flowers.

Mark Riley

Even though you could have stepped outside the door and it was an absolute war zone, as soon as you got inside, no matter who it was, people just acted differently. I think there’s a very profound thing there to notice is that when you treat people [well], most likely they will treat you [well] back. There were probably people that were doing very bad things that came to the Loft. Once they were inside, it was different.

Douglas Sherman

For me, I thought the party even sounded better at that time. It was just a better room. He really had the soundsystem at its peak at that time.

Yukihiro Suzuki

I was a college student, and I quit school and came to New York City from Buffalo. I was a waiter at that time at a Japanese restaurant and stuff.

I used to go to the Loft every weekend on Saturday night, take lots of psychedelics and go dance all night and sweat. And one night I had an amazing experience with his music. I start dancing, I start running with four feet, I start screaming like animal. And I realized it was already in the morning. And I have no memory. So that was my first experience. So I go to the Loft every Saturday. You know, that was my thing. I can’t wait for Saturday, every weekend. Forget everything.

We still had great people at 3rd Street. We had great dancers… Like, karate teachers, tai chi masters and kung fu masters and Spanish dance teachers and ballet dancers and gymnastic guys and fucking crazy athletes, right? And they get high, and with music – backspins and crazy splits on the dancefloor with the music. Some guys, I can’t see how they move, they’re too fast. I was like, “Aaahhh…” It was art for me.

Elyse Stefanishin

I had taken a sabbatical from school, and I spent a lot of time with David working on the soundsystem. I don’t know if a day went by he didn’t do something. We’d work on the same thing over and over, and he never seemed to feel like it was as good as it could be. He could do it every day and tune something and fix something and change something.

I worked with him on that and I learned a bit. He influenced me to read about John Diamond, and I ended up writing papers for a course that I took in music at that time, on the effect of music on health and health on music. I’ve come to believe that music has a great effect on one’s physicality and has a lot of healing aspects to it. I think hospitals have even come to realize that now. It was something that David talked about before I heard it anywhere else.

Douglas Sherman

I volunteered to continue to help with putting up balloons. Eventually, some of the other tasks became helping out with the coat check. It was just part of a growing relationship with him. He would ask if I was available to handle other tasks, and I was always a willing participant and it just evolved from there.

Yukihiro Suzuki

One day David invited me to a private Loft party. He liked me because I danced so hard all night. I lost my apartment. So I told David. He said, “Come over to the Loft, you can live with me and help me Saturday night.” So I started living with David – he gave me a little room in the Loft. Started helping with the Loft, my dream. Helping with the party was my dream, so my dream came true. And I was so happy. I make balloons, cleaned the room and dance all night with David music.

I lived at the Loft with David for seven years and he was my lover. It doesn’t have to be physical: he play music, I dance. And he’s very good at it. He control you. Just let David go, just keep on dancing and then David take you to some good place. So that’s our relationship. DJ booth to dancefloor, simply.

I was young. I was 23, he was like 47. And so it was very platonic and stuff. Just live together, eat together, he always sleep next to me on the couch. Yeah, we had a great time, seven years together. Was the best time of my life, you know, with David.

Elyse Stefanishin

On 3rd Street there was one night when I was regularly working there every single week doing the various jobs. I was just standing by the booth behind David, and he turned to me and he said, “I don’t feel well.” He said, “I have to go lie down.” I just looked at him, and he says, “I really don’t feel well. You’re going to have to do the music.” It was something I had never done. I had never handled his equipment. I didn’t even know the names of records. I didn’t know how he had them stored in the crates. There were a whole bunch of music crates and a whole bunch of records and I didn’t know where anything was.

I think Ernest was nearby. I called Ernest, and the first thing he did was pour himself a big glass of scotch. He wasn’t really cool on [playing] the music either. That’s when we got Doug to come in. Doug was more familiar with the placement of the records and things. We worked with Doug. David did go upstairs and did lie down and we did finish out the party. It was really kind of successful. I guess for a following maybe two, three times, Doug and I played the parties together.

The thing was, since I didn’t remember titles very well and we would have to decide what record to put on next, Doug would always end up humming or singing the first line of it. And I would say, “Yeah, that’s good,” or “That’s not good,” or “Save that for later.” We turned out some really good parties. As you know, Doug continued from that point, got involved in playing music.

Douglas Sherman

When [David] needed to take additional nights off, he allowed me and entrusted me to be in that role, so it just became another task to fill, a very responsible one. It was never something I ever asked for. It was something that David offered and invited me into, into that particular space, which was really a very sacred, respected area that I always will be very grateful to him to allow that trust in me to do that.

Mark Riley

The problem [David] had was that he wasn’t making enough money to keep up his mortgage and keep up the physical space. There started to be leaks in the ceiling and there were garbage cans all over the place and that sort of thing. He [rented] it out to some people, and they started a thing called the Choice, which was in that same place. Larry Levan played there for a while.

Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy

The first time I heard about the Loft, I knew we were going to the same place the Choice was, but that it was a different party. I didn’t really know what to expect at all. We knock on the door, we walk in, pay our $9.99, or $10 and get a cent back. Then go through the next set of doors and it was like I had finally arrived and I found my new home. It was an incredible experience, it was very psychedelic – the lighting, the music was really emotive, it was really deep dance music. I was hearing songs like Dexter Wansel “Life On Mars,” which I had never heard before. I didn’t know it even existed. I was more into alternative, punk rock, psychedelic rock. I had never heard that kind of soul music before, that deep underground psychedelic emotive soul.

I didn’t know they were Klipschorns at the times, but these speakers that were like totem poles were around this massive dancefloor, which had a huge disco ball in the center. Then there was this man who was very quietly, almost [with] that thousand-yard stare, standing behind these two turntables, his gaze just going across the whole dancefloor.

At the Loft, I felt so safe as a young woman alone. I could dance with somebody and have a really great dance together, but I didn’t feel that there was any expectation after that. I would become very good friends with people. I met a lot of record collectors and, of course, I was record collector myself so I fit right in there. I just felt very open, very free. It really changed my life. I started going every single week. It was so transformative. And then I became friends with David as well.

I had a radio show on WNYU and I asked David if he would come up to my radio show one day. He had never played records outside of his own home, outside of the Loft. He said, “Well, why don’t we go out for a drink first?” We had this conversation. I didn’t know a lot of about David. I didn’t really talk to him about his history. It was more just friendly conversation and talking about records. He did my radio show. He didn’t speak [on the air], he just chose the records. He was too shy to speak.

I would go buy new records at [East Village record shop] Dance Tracks and bring them over to his house in the middle of the week. He had such great comments because David didn’t care if something was trendy, but he would play things that were very current if they were really good and just did something that was a bit different. He kind of moved with the soulful side [of the era’s house music], Diamond Temple and stuff on Shelter, like “Keeping My Mind” by the Black Rascals. He was really quick with how he could evaluate a song.

Luis Vargas, AKA Loft Kid Luis

You put a record on [and David would say], “This is nice. Good intro. It has wheels. It has a peak and has an outro.” His favorite term was “It has wheels,” meaning that it could climb up and built to a certain place and it came back down, or built to a certain place and went higher. He didn’t really like when records just kept going, going up, up, up, up, and no return, basically. Just stayed, left you high.

Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy

He had quite a lot to say about some modern music as well: “It is anti-love, it is anti-music.” Or he would say, “It sounds like one big long intro.” You listen to these tracks and you go, “Actually, he is right.”

Douglas Sherman

Sometimes, he would come across records that were really, really good, but the sonic quality was so bad he wouldn’t play them. I know one record in particular he did play but he’d be very careful. That was “The Poem” by Bobby Konders. There’s a point right in the middle where it hits this really high note, this frequency. He would always drop the volume just for that note and then he’d bring it back up again. He was always sensitive to the sonics on the record.

Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy

I think it may have been springtime of ’93, so not that long, maybe a year and a half after first going to the party, he asked me to come along and play some records with him at the Loft. Of course, I was just like, “Oh, my gosh!” It was a certain kind of music that you would play at the Loft, not just being great from beginning to end because there is no mixing, but there is a certain kind of spirit.

I think I only played four records, but listened to my entire record collection before I went. I remember the first record I played was Lola, “Wax The Van.” It went down really well and David turned to me and said, “Very good, Colleen.” I knew how expensive these Koetsu cartridges were, but it is not like he gave me a tutorial on the soundsystem. He was really trusting.

David again asked me to do some “one-on-ones.” You have to remember his party was every week and it went from midnight to about noon. If he wasn’t feeling well, there were times when I filled in for the entire night. I remember one time he was going upstate and he handed me the keys.

Elyse Stefanishin

David started spending more time upstate at his house in Mount Tremper and I guess less time at the parties. I think it was difficult for him because there were numbers of obstacles. I know he loved going up to the country. I went up with him lots of times. He just liked nature. I guess it was getting away from all the difficult things he had [to deal with].

Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy

When I started going to the parties in the early ’90s on East 3rd Street, it is not like there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people there. David was a very underground name. Club culture in Manhattan, at that time, was a lot more about the Peter Gatien clubs and all of the club kids. David’s party was relatively unknown by a lot of people. There wasn’t a huge influx of the younger generation. It was really only a handful of us that were in their 20s who were going to those parties.

Elyse Stefanishin

Then, of course, the building was pretty much ripped away from him. That was ugly. That was really ugly. Losing the building was a horrible thing and probably one of the worst things, especially because it came through somebody he trusted.

Ernesto Green

David was always a very trusting person and he had a lawyer who took advantage of him. Really took advantage of him. David gave his lawyer power of attorney and the lawyer stole the property on 3rd Street. Stole his property upstate along with [that of] some other clients that he had. Eventually he went to jail for it, but by that time the building was already legally sold so there was nothing David could do.

Douglas Sherman

It was really a major transition for him to try to hold it all together and still have a home where he [could] continue to host parties.

Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy

There were a lot of fundraisers where it’s like, “Hey, get the word out, make sure to bring your friends. We are doing a fundraiser for this.” It was a really hard time for David financially.

Ernesto Green

He wasn’t about money. He was about the green energy just to survive. If he could give the parties every Saturday, and people were able to come in free and didn’t have to charge because everything was taken care of, he would have done that. If you needed a dollar, he would have given you a dollar.

Again, he’s from that part of the hippie era. He was very trusting and he wasn’t good with money. So he would just [be like], “Here, take this, handle this for me,” [with] the certain things that he knew had to be handled. His whole thing was people couldn’t mess with the soundsystem. That was his baby, you know? So everything else was secondary.

Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy

The East Village was being gentrified and he wanted to stay in the East Village. [Downtown] was the spiritual home of the Loft. Rudy Giuliani left such an incredibly bad mark on nightlife, parties. All of a sudden, this neighborhood where he has lived for decades has drastically changed. The rents have gone up, there are all of these people that are paying thousands of dollars for their studio apartment and they don’t want any noise and they don’t want the riff-raff hanging out. So he moved [around a lot].

Yukihiro Suzuki

We moved to Avenue A. Oh my God, nobody showed up. All the good dancers, they never came back again.

Donna Weiss

Everybody knew he was in one place for so many years. And then all of a sudden he’s on Avenue A, he’s on 14th street, Avenue B.

Yukihiro Suzuki

I stopped dancing for lots of reasons. But David stopped playing music. Then David was disappointed or something [that I] stopped coming to the party, stopped dancing. Stupid stuff. I was young.

Tim Lawrence

When I first met [David], he had just really got started to get going again on Avenue B. Then it was just really probably a matter of months later that he lost the space. It was a rollercoaster, I suppose, for him at the time. He certainly had a very strong commitment of what the Loft had been and what it could still be. But he was also going through this transitional period of having no money, of having to rethink how he was going to do it. He certainly was not going to be able to straightforwardly buy [property] anywhere. That was unnerving for him.

Yet he had a sense of optimism. No matter how fucking awful things might become, there’s a sense that around the corner there is always [possibility]. It wasn’t that long after that, Nuphonic brought out the first Loft classics compilation.

Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy

I had noticed that in Britain there were a lot of great compilations coming out. One label [releasing them] was Nuphonic, and I thought [this was] a way to tell David’s story. And obviously, a part of it was to help him financially.

I asked David, “Would you consider doing some compilations?” He said, “Only with you.” Now, I was [in the process of] moving to London and didn’t really have a financial situation to start my own record label, but Dave Hill from Nuphonic happened to be over in New York and I mentioned it to him and he was all over it.

I think [David] loved the compilations in the sense that it did tell his story. We tried to get a good cross-section of music. Everything was licensed properly. [I’m] still very proud of them and I think it exposed David to a lot of people who wouldn’t normally have known about the Loft. And then, in conjunction with Tim Lawrence’s book, which came out [a few years] after, it really exposed the Loft and its influence to so many different people and I really think that did help David in his later years.

Tim Lawrence

I was writing this book that was supposed to be about house music culture. I’d already set up interviews with Frankie Knuckles, Tony Humphries, David Morales, and so just in passing almost when I was interviewing these guys, I said, “By the way, I’ve met this guy David Mancuso. He seems to have been there from the start. It seems like what he was doing was really interesting, but there’s no reference points here... Have you ever heard of him?”

They [all] almost in a semi-religious tone said, “David Mancuso was the most important person in my musical life. It was on the Loft dancefloor that I learned about the transformative power of dance culture. It was through David that I learned about the expansive possibilities of dancing to music.” I just thought, “OK.”

David, there was something about our interaction, he felt that he trusted me, maybe, to start to explore this story. There was something that needed to be written that people were bursting to say and somehow hadn’t quite been asked, so I plunged into it.

Within house music culture it had begun to really seem as though a lot of what was going on was DJs selecting records because they were good to mix, rather than because they were good in and of themselves. Suddenly, I’m going into the Loft and there is no mixer. The record plays from beginning to end. David will only put on records that are good enough to run for their entire duration. He starts to tell me about a philosophy that involves him not calling himself a “DJ” and not wanting to interfere with the music. The whole soundsystem is about a mutual reproduction of the music as it’s recorded, not for the sole purpose that it will enhance the energy of the party.

A whole set of ideas started to flow out. An ethical way of thinking about dance music culture – which is not to say that no one else is interested in these questions or no one else is ethical. But the level at which David was thinking through these questions was to a completely different degree to more or less anyone I’ve met at that point. I was captivated.

Douglas Sherman

In those spaces [on Avenue A and B], David lived in them. They were essentially his home. He still had enough space to continue hosting the Loft parties. It was just a matter of how he had to scale down on the size of it. He didn’t have as large a following in those years turning out for his parties [but] there were some great dancers that still continued to attend. Eventually he took an apartment that was simply for him to live. That’s when he began traveling overseas.

Tim Lawrence

David went to Japan for the first time. That was almost sacrilegious for him to play outside of the Loft, because he had decided he didn’t want to do that. He never thought of himself as a DJ. He was never going to play abroad, particularly for fees. It wasn’t what he was interested in. He once said to me that if he couldn’t do what he did in the way he was doing it, instead of becoming a DJ he would probably go and work on an organic vineyard in the hills. He wants organic community.

He did go to Japan because he was offered a fee and he thought, “I’ll just do this once because the fee will help me purchase [my place on] Avenue B.” That fell through. He went to Japan and the guy didn’t pay him. It all went wrong.

[But on] this trip he met a guy called Satoru, who was running this venue Precious Hall in Japan.

Francois Kevorkian

Unquestionably, Satoru Ogawa took notice very early on of what was going on in New York. [He] had a club called Precious Hall [and] opened a second club called Fillmore North that was pretty much dedicated to trying to bring the Loft experience to Sapporo. It had pretty much an exact replica of the Prince Street system down to I don’t know what level of detail, but it’s astounding.

I remember being there one day and standing on the middle of the dancefloor closing my eyes. In this flashback I thought I was on Prince Street, I’m telling you. I live my entire life with audio. I know an audio footprint. I close my eyes. I was back. It was that level of devotion and dedication.

Tim Lawrence

Satoru and David really got on, and Satoru made it clear he was committed to recreating David’s set-up soundsystem in Precious Hall and started to ask David over [to play records]. At that point David went over and started to understand this concept that the Loft doesn’t have to take place in his own home in order for it to work.

Ernesto Green

He had opportunities of getting places or being involved with other folks [to host the New York parties], but they always wanted to [sell] alcohol in the parties, which we always felt was a no-no.

Mark Riley

Believe me, there were many people over the years that tried to get him to change when he had financial problems: “David, if you’d just charge for this, or if you’d just charge for that, you’d be out of the woods.” David never ever would, and I always admired him for that. Whether he was flushed with money or if he was dead broke, David stuck to a certain established set of principles and never changed.

Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy

He did some stuff at Jellybean’s place, the Marc Ballroom on Union Square.

Ernesto Green

And then David called me and he said, “I’ve found the place. I want you to come over with me.” He took me over to the Ukrainian [National Home]. First thing he did, he said, “Listen. Clap and you can hear the echoing. The sound can just travel.” And he just sat there for a while and he said, “This is it.”

Part Four: Home Again

Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy

When he found the Ukrainian hall, it was a golden moment. He was just over the moon. It is a beautiful place and it feels like the Loft. You feel the spirit, it is in the boards. He was so into the sense of place. We talk about David’s soundsystem, we talk about the Klipschorns, we talk about the Koetsus and Mark Levinson’s electronics, but it all comes down to room acoustics. This is a lesson he proclaimed over and over and over again.

Donna Weiss

[Things] started to become more steady, and then the parties were getting bigger again. David basically had most of his friends or people he was very friendly with work because trust was a big issue to him. I worked on 3rd Street. I worked Avenue A. I worked in Avenue B, 14th Street and at the Ukraine.

Ernesto Green

We had security, but you wouldn’t come here and see these big bouncer-looking type guys. I worked the door.

Luis Vargas, AKA Loft Kid Luis

The opportunity came to start helping to put the parties together, and then I started taking over the production part, and now I’m the head of production. So, basically I coordinate all the effort to get the party together. Hang the ball, put the speakers in, move the truck.

Ernesto Green

Once we moved there I think we started with maybe three parties [a year]. It was a whole production now.

Douglas Sherman

You have to understand. When David was in his home, everything was stationary. It really wasn’t until he had to find venues to host these parties in where he now had to put things in storage. [Everything] will come out of storage. There will be this set-up before, and then after the breakdown and moving everything back in the storage. It was never really his vision, but it’s what it evolved into, in order for him to continue to host these parties and keep them going.

Ernesto Green

Sunday [on] holiday [weekends] seemed like it was the best day because parking was a problem [otherwise]. We had to get a van and truck to move the equipment. Set-up would sometimes start on Fridays through Saturdays. By Sunday we’re ready.

When we moved over to the Ukrainian you can see an influx of the hipsters and that generation starting to come and the interest that they show. Later in the 2000s, that’s when I noticed really the influx of the Japanese kids [who] know so much about the history of the Loft, you know? There’s a lot of interest and now we have our regulars. The folks that come to every party, but you can see they appreciate it from the first time that they came through the door. We have four a year.

Paul Raffaele

I first heard about the Loft through Love Saves the Day, the book by Tim Lawrence. It was right at the time when I was rigorously trying to educate myself about music culture. I didn’t know it was still going on at the time. I was going to [Danny Krivit’s party] 718 Sessions for a few years before I ever went to the Loft. One day, one of the people that I invited to go to 718 Sessions invited me to come to the Loft for the first time. He’s about my age, so he’s like a newcomer, too. And we went there.

There’s this bombastic energy when you walk into the Ukrainian National hall. It’s like you walk in, and it feels like kind of a bar mitzvah. You walk through this kitchen area. You walk through this little makeshift coat check, and you’re in this kind of dancehall with tables. And just beyond the columns is this incredible amount of energy. And you walk past Douglas or whoever is selecting the records and you just get swallowed by it.

Barbie Bertisch

First walking into the Loft at the Ukrainian hall, I think it just really hit me really hard. It was a sense of belonging. I think amongst, yes, friends that were my age and people that I would see out. But I think it was almost this sort of comfortable, safe, inclusive, almost reminiscing-of-childhood type of space because you just felt so embraced in the situation.

Hiromi Kiba

My dancing life definitely flourished through the Loft. I’m not hesitant to do anything that I feel like doing. To me, the Loft party somehow built my unconsciousness stronger. It’s almost like an animal instinct, but you just feel the music, and you don’t rationalize it. You just move the way you feel.

I noticed it recently when I go to other parties, and I know the people want to dance, but they are very conscious of their surroundings, or what other people think about them. I sense that they are wanting to dance, but they can’t get up on the dancefloor. That doesn’t happen to me anymore. I think it’s mainly because of the Loft.

Paul Raffaele

It’s a total relief. It’s a sense of, I don’t have to look a certain way for anyone. I don’t have to justify why I’m dancing this way. I don’t need to dance by any other conventions. My body’s reacting to what I’m hearing in a very free way, and it’s just a very freeing feeling. Especially when someone comes and sprays some baby powder at your feet and you can just slide around like you’re in your living room.

The records I associate with the Loft most are the Winners “Get Ready For The Future.” That’s a big one for me. [Lonnie Liston Smith’s] “Expansions.” Trussel’s “Love Injection,” which gave me the idea to start the zine. When we were thinking of names for the zine, once it got into my head I couldn’t imagine calling it anything else, because we would just scream it and belt it at the top of our lungs every time we hear it.

“The Whistle Song,” Frankie Knuckles. Super emotional whenever that comes on. Especially after Frankie had passed away. It was such a moment. I think it was summer. It was super hot in the room, there was no air conditioning, and everyone just kind of melted into each other with locked arms and was crying. It was one of my most vivid memories there.

Barbie Bertisch

I mean, there’s endless moments. It’s almost hard to pinpoint them because the entire night is a moment. It just feels like it comes and goes so quickly. I think that part of the journey, of getting acquainted with the room, is its own kind of experience or its own kind of memory. You see Josie dancing around and you want to take that in…

Josie Ritondo

I am 63 years old. I could dance for 18 hours straight. My kids said to me, “Mom, take a break,” because I out-dance them and they’re young, but because it feeds me, it feeds me.

Luis Vargas, AKA Loft Kid Luis

It’s like being lost in a wave. You’re not really sure where you are in that wave but you’re in it and you feel it.

My family, we’re all very different. My daughter is gay, my brother is really straight, staunch, almost Republican now (I don’t know how that happened, but it did). My other brother is a musician and an entrepreneur. My sister went to Boston University and became strait-laced. But we’re all Loft kids when we get to the Loft.

David Felton

I may only have missed three or four parties in the last ten years.

Tina Magennis

I went [to the Loft] through Prince Street until 1976, and I moved out to California. I was probably in touch with everybody through maybe ’81-’82 and then somehow lost touch for a number of years. Then when I reconnected, which I guess is a good 15 years [ago], I was traveling for business quite often. I had the best boss in the world and at the beginning of the year she would say, “OK, I know you’re going to want to know when you’re going to New York for the dances,” and I was able to schedule my business travel around David’s dances. Thank God.

So for me to be involved all these years is amazing. It’s funny, because on my car in California, because you can have vanity plates, my license is “LOFT NYC.”

David Liu

It was probably 2000-and-something. I went back to New York and I heard that it coincided with one of [David’s] events, and you know by that time we were friends. It was held in the Ukrainian hall on Second Avenue. I went and it was just incredible, because all the people there had been going, like Tina, for years and years. They were like aged hippies, much older. There were people who had been going there since the ’70s. They would bring their children. It was unbelievable. It was a very benign feeling, a very gentle kind of atmosphere, but people just danced.

Ernesto Green

When [David] found out I was getting married he said, “Just get married here.” [We were] married at the Ukrainian the day before we had the party on Sunday, with all the decorations for the party. [David] asked me what colors I wanted, asked my wife what colors she wanted. The place was decorated in white and silver balloons. We had a great time. Everyone loved the space. It was a Loft wedding.

Douglas Sherman

I met my wife there at the Loft. It still happens where people meet on the dancefloor and somehow it clicks for them, and it continues. Again, I think it comes back to creating an environment where people feel somewhat liberated and with other people who they connect with. It’s not something you can plan, but you can lay the groundwork, and then, whatever it produces, whatever energy comes out of that in an organic way is what will be.

Part Five: Time For One More Baby

Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy

[David] wanted to build communities, so we started the [Lucky Cloud Sound System] party with him in London in 2003. We had our own soundsystem, and that took a few years for it to become its own thing. He was so proud of the London parties. [But then] he would slowly kind of phase himself out of the parties.

I remember the first time [it happened]. I had set the system up and I was supposed to go and pick him up and he said, “I can’t do it today, you have got to do it.” I said, “What?!” He said he was really ill. Now that I look back, he was trying to prove that it could go on and he was also testing me and testing the party. That it should go on without David Mancuso behind the decks. That it’s not about him. He said, “Don’t advertise it, don’t say who is playing records.”

[David] recently started bringing me back to [New York to] musically host with Doug. David always said it is not about the ego, like, “I am the main DJ.” It is not like that. There always has to be a back-up plan, so there always has to be other people who are ready to fill in or take over at last minute’s notice because the party must go on.

Douglas Sherman

David would start the parties, and then, without announcing anything, he would say, “I have to go,” and he would leave. Then, we were left making sure the party will continue. You really can’t narrow it down to just being behind the turntables. That was really for him the least important thing. Whether it was exhibiting artwork, having food that was presented properly, how people are greeted at the door, it was all these things that were important to him.

The aches and pains he dealt with in his knees, in his back, his steadiness in his hand and his vision were all things that made it more challenging for him.

Donna Weiss

The last few years he was having some trouble with his eyes, so he wasn’t playing, but he would be there for set-up. And he’d call me like a dozen times during the party, and so he was very involved.

Once we actually got him to sit at the [sign-in] table. I used to ask him all the time, “Come. People just want to see you. You know, just come sit with me at the door.” Once he did that. He said, “You know, this was really nice.” He never liked all the attention. I think that’s why, as much as he enjoyed sitting at the door, he didn’t really want to do it again, because everybody was, “Oh, my God. David.”

Ernesto Green

He started getting older. Wear and tear on the body. Standing all those hours.

Josie Ritondo

David was very extremely fragile at that point. He wasn’t coming out of his apartment. He had surgery on his neck and after his surgery he [would] only come down to go to the doctor and to get his medicine. That’s the only thing that he will come out for. Everything else was brought up to him. I mean, he was a functional member of society in the Lower East Side for a very long time, but unfortunately he didn’t [have] an apartment in the first floor. He [had] his apartment in the sixth floor.

One of the things that mainly affected David throughout his life is that he couldn’t sleep. He always needed help to sleep, so… that contributed to him not being out there all the time. He’d say, “Oh my God, I didn’t sleep that well last night. I’m trying to sleep today. I know we made a date, but we cannot do this today.” If he didn’t feel like opening the door for us, he would not open the door. Sometimes he will wake up and change the locks because he would get paranoid that somebody has the key. And then we wouldn’t have a key to get in and he’s sleeping at the wrong time when we’re supposed to come. It became a challenge in many ways.

Elyse Stefanishin

David would call me sometimes five times a day. Then sometimes he would drop out for a few days and we wouldn’t hear from him.

Ernesto Green

Douglas and his wife, and Elyse and I – we hadn’t heard from him in a few days right after the [2016 presidential] election. We started calling him, not getting any response, so Douglas called me and we decided to meet after work, went over to his house. And unfortunately found out he had passed away.

Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy

When I first found out he passed away, I didn’t even turn to dance music. I put on [Van Morrison’s] Astral Weeks. That was one of his favorite albums. Listened to it beginning to end. I couldn’t do anything for 24 hours except listen to Astral Weeks and the Moody Blues and “Love Is The Message.”

Josie Ritondo

I honestly feel that it was the election that killed him, Donald Trump winning the election. He would call me and we will spend hours talking about politics. He was very adamant against Donald Trump… I had a conversation with him the day before [the election] and he kept on saying, “He’s not going to win, he’s not going to win. No way, no way.”

Ernesto Green

Donald Trump is the antithesis of what David believed in. Probably for David, for him to live in a world and Donald Trump be the president, he probably couldn’t take it. His heart may have just given out.

Josie Ritondo

The influence that David [had] on so many of us was so enormous. After his passing, we had quite a few gatherings in his memory. I went to all of them, but different people came to each one of them, like hundreds of people, and these are people from back in the day. These are people that from word-of-mouth [heard] we’re having a memorial for David, “I want to come.” It was very, very sweet.

Elyse Stefanishin

We wanted something first of all that was somewhat uplifting. David probably would never want anything, being as modest as he was and humble as he was. But so many people were so touched by him that I think we all had to get together and talk about how he affected so many different people and how he was so important and special in their lives.

We didn’t want [the Loft party after his passing] to be anything else but the usual party. It was. A lot of the music that was played was David’s favorite songs and tracks you would associate with him. Of course, he was terribly missed, but it was also [the fact] that we’re together and we’re going on and we’re continuing. It was a happy event.

Ernesto Green

It was lots of laughing, lots of tears. It was high points. For me it was a rollercoaster. It’s been a rollercoaster for me since David passed away. I miss hearing from him. You know, sometimes I’m having a bad day and I get a call from David: “I just wanted to wish you a great day.”

Elyse Stefanishin

I don’t think there was a time where he hung up the phone without saying “I love you,” and meaning it.

Donna Weiss

[David and I] had a very spiritual relationship. We started this [ritual] in the Ukraine. There were a lot of people who had passed – friends of his and people who were big Lofties. So he asked me to light candles at each party. So we set up a spiritual candle table, and he only wanted me to do that because he knew where my head was. So I had this table for our beloved ancestors.

The party [after his passing] it was for David. So as I was lighting the candles, it was different because we had his picture on the wall. Really beautiful. I did only white candles, and I just was saying, “Oh, I can’t believe that I’m lighting these candles for you.” But I was. He was the beloved ancestor that time.

The crew that has been mostly putting the parties together – other than David coming to do the soundsystem and set that up – [is who’s] been working it for the last number of years. And that’s why we’re able to continue it and want to continue it, because he wanted us to do that. It was very clear that was David’s goal.

Luis Vargas, AKA Loft Kid Luis

In later years, we didn’t get a lot of time to talk as much as we should have and I would have liked to, and that part I miss the most. I miss the opportunity, and the things that I took for granted because I thought I had all the time in the world.

It’s difficult. There are lots of things to deal with, and lots of energies, and forces, and things that are happening, and changing, and with the passing of David it really makes it a lot harder for sure. Because he definitely had the last word. Like the father who says, “OK, we’re going to Disney.” Everything stops and we will go to Disney. What David told one person wasn’t always the same thing he told other people, and understanding that about David is part of the whole experience of being a part of it.

It’s truly a family. A family that, yes, we have our differences. But just like any family in the world, and dynamic on the planet, it just has to be worked out. The group that puts the Loft together is unique in that we all have really full lives aside from this, and we all put it on pause to make this happen. We’re a group of people that have to dance and throw this event the way that it was always envisioned… with this vision that was David’s.

Yukihiro Suzuki

Nobody understand him. He’s too brilliant. I don’t like to [say] genius – everybody’s a “genius.” But he’s very special.

I’m still not there, but I try to understand David. I’m still figuring it out. I have lots of questions: who is he, who I am, why he did [what he did], why he said [what he said]. It’s very deep. It’s not easy to understand David. It takes a while, but I’m still trying. Because I love him. Yeah, he was the first person I really love. He was last one. Nobody else for me, you know. He was the one for me. The rest of my life, he was the one for me.

Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy

He was myopic in his vision of these parties. This was the only thing that mattered and it wasn’t a hedonistic kind of vision, it was a vision of a holistic experience of raising the life energy of everybody on the dancefloor, of social progress, of community.

Maybe five years ago we were at my house in London and we were sitting in the back garden. I said, “David, I was so young, I was 23, 24 years old. I didn’t know about your soundsystem as much as I know now. Why did you even let me play records [at the Loft]?” He said, “It starts with a vibe long before you hit the turntable.”

Tim Lawrence

When I was writing the obituaries for David, I just was emphasizing this again and again: forget all the “godfather of electronica” and the rest of it, this guy was putting on a party every week in his home for friends. End of story. In a way, we don’t need to know much more than that.

Mark Riley

David as a real person would first and foremost reject deification. David didn’t want to be deified. He didn’t want to be an icon. He didn’t want to be any of those things. He wanted to play music for friends and people that loved to dance. That was what he wanted to do and he stayed consistent with that throughout his life after the 14th of February in 1970.

Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy

I don’t think David would have expected any kind of fanfare after his passing. I think he would have cared most about his friends in the Loft community and how it affected them. As far as the public tributes and how many magazine articles and how many radio shows, I don’t think that would have mattered to him. It is more about the spirit. Is that permeating the environment?

Francois Kevorkian

David’s musical DNA I think has permeated all of us now as DJs, as music lovers, as people who throw events, and all of this is spreading.

Luis Vargas, AKA Loft Kid Luis

All the parties that are doing their thing [inspired by the Loft], God bless them for it. All the power to them, and absolutely continue to do it. The stuff in London, the stuff in Italy, Japan, in Hawaii, California, holding it down. Chicago’s still doing it. New Jersey’s throwing it down. It’s coming up from everywhere and it’s coming out of the rafters and keep on, for sure.

Just keep hanging a disco ball. Produce the events. Don’t just go to a place and turnkey it, and expect it to be the same. Throw an event, put some time, bring some stuff, change it. If it’s got hard edges put balloons up and make it soft. Make it the dream. Or make it a dream.

Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy

They should each have their own identity, but the fact that this idea is spreading on a greater level, he would have been very proud of it. He referred to them as giving birth to another baby, that is how he felt about these parties: “I think I have time for one more baby.” He would write me emails like, “My water broke.” He wanted these parties to be filled with friendship and dancing and celebrating life.

Douglas Sherman

For me, the Loft is an idea that manifests in your mind and lives in your heart. In essence, it’s a feeling of love and joy. David would say to me, “We’re only a part of the whole.” That said, you begin to understand exactly the value of Love Saves the Day and bring us all together as one community where despite all our differences, we celebrate our individuality. He created an environment where we feel safe, free and liberated. Together, we share what I think David created and I would call our spiritual common ground, and that is the dancefloor.