The Lab: An Outsider’s Adventure Inside the World of Hip-Hop is a transformation memoir set inside Brooklyn nightlife at the moment hip-hop rose from local power to global industry. I was the least likely person to run a club in Bed-Stuy—an Upper West Side/Martha’s Vineyard kid, Boston University–educated, with a background in politics and public service. But once I opened the doors, I learned fast: running a nightclub wasn’t about music. It was about survival—street economics, promoter politics, law enforcement pressure, and the constant negotiation required to keep the peace.

Over seventeen years, the venue evolved from hard-edged hip-hop nights to a crucial space for Black LGBTQ/ballroom and lesbian nightlife, and later—under its legal name, The Electric Warehouse—into one of the city’s wildest rave/EDM warehouses. Inside the club, it was a constant high-wire act: money, personalities, and reinvention—night after night.

Outside the club, the stakes were just as real. A local neighborhood gang conflict unfolded in the immediate area around The Lab, and the tension didn’t always stay on the street. It shaped decisions, tested relationships, and created consequences that followed me long after the music stopped—at times putting my life in danger. Through near-riots, crackdowns, and escalating violence, the story reveals how culture is shaped by who controls the room, who gets protected, and who gets targeted.

This isn’t a “you had to be there” local club story. It’s a universal narrative about transformation under pressure—what it costs to survive, what power really looks like, and how one room can remake a person.