the dawn of the 21st century — Wednesday, June 18, 2003 — in New York City’s Flatiron District, the gateway between uptown wealth and downtown cool. We’re on the west side of Madison Square, and 33-year-old Shawn Carter is busy. Several hours from now, he’ll host a massive party that shuts down West 25th Street and attracts celebrities like his longtime friend and business partner Dame Dash, Heavy D, Magic Johnson, Nets point guard Jason Kidd, and golfer Ricky Barnes.
His answer evokes countless nights in the Eighties and early Nineties, when he was likely left out in the line, waiting with the rest of us herbs and schmucks. But now, the kid from Marcy has his own rope, his own door, and his own club. Just off a legendary succession of six platinum albums, this will be his headquarters, his laboratory, his playground, his office suite, for the next two decades, where with a select team around him, he’ll complete the leap from businessman to a business.
There was an amber, resin-top bar, leather-upholstered banquettes on bleacher-style rises of polished white marble, walnut millwork, and an installation of custom-made baseball bats pin-mounted in a rhythmic pattern. It was all dark wood and soft leather bathed in warm light, like being inside a rich friend’s mansion, or their humidor.
Locating the club in New York’s historical nightlife pantheon, Berkowitz says, “Studio 54 was once the place where everybody could be seen, and for athletes and for musicians and for some celebrities, was that. It was a place where they could go and be comfortable and nobody would bother them, but there’d be regular people there, because the regular people knew this was their place, too. There’s very few places where you can mix and mingle like that. The stadium seating is out in the open.
Back in 2003, Carter had hit every milestone, and broken every record. He’d taken over Summer Jam, earned five mics in The Source, and arguably had the longest and most dominant run as “King of New York” that rap had ever seen. Withhis elevation to head of Def Jam the next year, and his subsequent split from business partners Dame Dash and Kareem “Biggs” Burke, Carter signaled he was moving on to the next period of his life, the mogul in his post-artist era.
adds: “Certainly, from our competitors’ standpoint, they’ve got to be concerned. Jay-Z and Roc Nation bring a lot to the party. He’s got reach to places that probably are different from what, typically, CAA is involved in.”
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