How It Used To Be by Alisha Williams, Mbg, 1992. One of the 855 records David Mancuso kept and played at The Loft until the end of his life in 2016, standing on the shelves of The Loft Library — an immersive 3D listening room by Danny Fortunato, where it can be taken down and put on the deck.
THE RECORD COLLECTION OF DAVID MANCUSO, 1944–2016
KEPT AND PLAYED AT THE LOFT UNTIL THE END OF HIS LIFE
PRESERVED WITH LOVE BY THE LOFT COMMUNITY
Nothing in it yet.
Every cut you love can go in.
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Only your first name and email are kept: to sign you in and say hello, nothing else. Download or delete everything from here, any time. Privacy
Invitation, 1972, and emblem — via Lucky Cloud Sound System · Prince Street, 1983 — Sandy Moon, The Loft Party Gallery
Hover a photograph to pick it up · click to read the backTap a photograph to read the back
The Loft Library is the last personal record collection of David Mancuso — the 855 records that were still in his home when he died in 2016 — rebuilt by Danny Fortunato as a room you can walk through, take a record down from, and listen to, side by side, the way he played them.
This is not a shop and not a playlist. It is an archive with a turntable in it. Every sleeve on the shelves is a real record from the collection, identified and scanned; every one that has been transferred can be put on the deck and heard whole. The shelves are arranged by decade, from the sixties down to the two thousands, and you descend through them by scrolling.
Three things to know before you go in. Scroll to descend the decades. Click or tap a record to bring it to the deck. And the tonearm is real: hold it, drag it across the record and drop it on another groove.
He grew up in an orphanage in Utica, New York, where a nun named Sister Alicia hung balloons in the rooms and played records for the children. He spent the rest of his life rebuilding that room.
Born on 20 October 1944, he came to New York City in the early sixties and, by the end of the decade, was living in a loft at 647 Broadway and giving rent parties for his friends. On Valentine's Day 1970 he sent out invitations to one of them and called it Love Saves the Day. That party never really ended.
He was an audiophile first. Klipschorn speakers, Koetsu cartridges, the shortest signal path he could build; in later years he took the mixer out of the chain altogether and played straight from the turntables into the amplifiers. He did not beat-mix and rarely touched an EQ: he played records whole, in the order he had chosen, at the level they were mastered for. Sound quality, to him, was a form of hospitality — the same impulse as the food on the table.
In 1975 he co-founded the New York Record Pool, the first of its kind, so that DJs could get records from the labels directly, and he is remembered for breaking records nobody else had found — Manu Dibango's Soul Makossa, famously, out of a West Indian shop in Brooklyn. He died in New York on 14 November 2016, still playing.
It was not a club. There was no bar, no door policy, no VIP, no alcohol for sale — just balloons, a table of food and juice, an invitation you had to be given, and a sound system he had tuned obsessively. The party was private, in his own home, and the guests were the point.
Balloons, 1995 · the food table, 1995 · Third Street, 1993 — Sandy Moon, The Loft Party Gallery
The room moved when the leases did: from 647 Broadway to 99 Prince Street in SoHo in 1975, to Third Street in Alphabet City in the mid-eighties, and on into other rooms after that. The Loft outlasted the clubs it inspired. Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles and Nicky Siano passed through his rooms before they built their own, and the Paradise Garage, the Warehouse and the Gallery carried its idea of a party out into the world. He kept throwing the same party, in one loft or another, for forty-six years.
What you are moving through is what was left at the end.
Over the decades the collection thinned. What remained were the sides he kept reaching for — the ones he chose to finish with, the ones he could not bring himself to let go of. He was still playing them when he died.
The catalogue was gathered by Michael Anthony Mertens in 2009, record by record: 855 of them, from 611 artists on 329 labels, most of them from the seventies and eighties, with a short shelf of older sides and a handful whose year nobody has established. Each one has since been matched to its release on Discogs and its sleeve scanned; the sides are transferred wherever a transfer exists, and the records still waiting for one carry a COMING SOON sticker on the shelf.
Nothing here is for sale. Every record links out to its Discogs page, where the pressings, the credits and the market are — and all 855 are written out, shelf by shelf, in the catalogue.
| ← → | Walk along the nearest shelf; with a record up, the previous or next record |
| Enter | Put the highlighted record on the deck |
| Esc | Close what is open — this page, the search, or the record |
| Back | The browser's back button does the same: it closes before it leaves |
He built the room, the shelves, the deck and the souvenirs on the table around the 855 records David Mancuso kept.
The transfers are here so the records can be heard as he played them, whole. If you hold rights to one of them, or to one of the photographs, and want it taken down or credited differently — or if you have a record, a scan, a photograph or a story that belongs on these shelves — write to contact@daniel-fortunato.com.
This site counts its visits without knowing who makes them: which records are opened and played, for how long, and whether a shared cut gets opened — to learn what the room is used for, and to show it to the people who help it grow. No name, no email and no IP address is kept, no cookie is set, and the anonymous number this browser is given is forgotten after thirteen months. The counts are held by PostHog, in the European Union.