Brooklyn, the Remix: A Hip-Hop Tour
Boerum Hill
Then
“I used to cop in Harlem, all of my Dominicanos. Right there up on Broadway, brought me back to that McDonald’s. Took it to my stash spot, 560 State Street.”
— Jay-Z in ‘Empire State of Mind’
560 State Street at Flatbush Avenue: Jay-Z, who grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant and took his name from the nearby train lines, shouted out this address on the edge of Boerum Hill as being his old stash house from his drug-dealing days in “Empire State of Mind,” his 2009 hit with Alicia Keys. He reportedly lived there briefly in the mid-90s when he was an up-and-coming rapper. (The building housed many musicians and artists at that time, like Lord Jamar of the hip-hop group Brand Nubian.)
However Jay-Z used his apartment, the building currently houses renovated luxury units. A two-bedroom apartment recently listed by the Corcoran Group for $3,995 a month featured noise-isolating thermal windows, central air-conditioning and stainless steel Frigidaire appliances including two dishwashers. And just a block away, where there were once empty lots and mom-and-pop shops, sits the gleaming new Barclays Center, home to the Brooklyn Nets. Jay-Z is in the process of selling his one-fifteenth of a percent of the team.
560 State Street in the mid-1980s. Jay-Z shouted it out as a stash house from his drug-dealing days in “Empire State of Mind.”
Today: 560 State Street is a luxury residential building.
Copyright © 2013 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission. Brian Larkin/The New York Times.
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