By D.M. Levine

You can spend hours at 172 Duane Street, in Tribeca, and still have no clue what’s going on here. People come and go at all hours. A thick cloud of pot smoke makes you think you’ve wandered into a building on fire with a stereo cranked at full blast. Sometimes the four-story warehouse is a sprawling art gallery; at other times, it’s a photo studio, or an indie band’s rehearsal space. Most of the time, it’s all of these things at once.

On a recent blustery December night, rapper Mos Def was in the house. Dressed in brown slacks, shiny dress shoes, jean jacket and a cabby hat tilted to the side, he sipped a bottle of Rolling Rock, taking in the vibe. “It’s like a cross between early Hitsville, Andy Warhol’s Factory and a little bit of the Algonquin roundtable,” he told me. “But it’s something completely different.”

As it happens, this shape-shifting space has a name—DD172—a business plan and a onetime mogul making it all happen. DD is for Damon Dash, the 38–year–old fallen hip-hop impresario who thought it would be cool to start a hippie art collective right smack in the middle of one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan. It is, in short, the kind of scene you hoped still existed in Manhattan, but feared might have gone away.

“Everybody’s welcome here,” a beautiful Edie Sedgwick blonde named McEnzie Eddy told me. “You have to, um, have a certain spirit in order to feel welcome here.”

McEnzie is tall and slender as a ski pole, in her early 20s. Doesn’t walk so much as she floats. This is her space as much as anyone’s. She’s at the very top of the food chain here, a member of a select group of three people that has at times been referred to as “The Loop”—the inner circle that runs the place.

As the night heated up, McEnzie made the rounds—to a waifish girl who looks a lot like Cindy Lauper, at work on a wall painting, to a bearded guy mixing a recently recorded track with Mr. Dash.

McEnzie moved here from South Carolina, started working for Mr. Dash right out of college as his “assistant’s assistant,” and has moved up the ranks since. When she talks, she uses words like “wack and “ill” (as in so-and-so “is the illest dude I’ve ever met”), which indicates she’s spent a lot of time around her boss.

“This space has a certain type of feeling. … You can thrive here, you know?” She leaned back in her seat and half-closed her eyes, continuing a bit dreamily. “If you have that spirit, you recognize it right away when you walk in. And you don’t want to leave. And everyone in here recognizes it in you. … You feel it, you know? There’s just like a—you feel it.”

DOWN THE HALL I found Mr. Dash, in tight jeans and chunky black-framed glasses, smoking a joint, a group of followers huddled around him like a football scrum. “Damn, my payroll just keeps getting bigger and bigger,” he said, to no one in particular. He’d just hired a new graphic designer—a young 20-something who’d shown Dash his portfolio and gotten himself on the payroll in the course of about three minutes. Then he grabbed me by the shoulder. “Come with me while I get a haircut.”

Taken from The New York Observer (Read the rest of the full article HERE)

Props to Joey Rubin of the TASTE CREW for the link…