Alpine, N.J., Home of Hip-Hop Royalty

New York Times
February 11, 2007
Alpine, N.J., Home of Hip-Hop Royalty
By DOUGLAS CENTURY

Correction Appended

ALPINE, N.J.

DRIVING north on the Palisades Interstate Parkway, it’s easy to blow past this town and end up halfway to Rockland County. But make the turn onto Old Closter Dock Road, and you’ll find yourself touring one of the richest towns in America, a hamlet of small leafy streets and stately homes, a longtime preserve of the wealthy white elite.

By Alpine’s standards Eddie Farrell’s house is hardly jaw-dropping. A five-bedroom split-level ranch with a lawn and swimming pool, it is to all outward appearances a slice of cookie-cutter, upper-middle-class domesticity.

But buzz the intercom, and a visitor soon descends into a hip-hop version of Bruce Wayne’s Batcave: a gleaming wonderland of computers, keyboards and recording gadgetry hidden behind the soundproofed suburban facade. On a recent winter morning Mr. Farrell, a producer and D.J. known professionally as Eddie F., was holding court in his Mini Mansion Recording studio. Loading a pair of MP3 files — recent releases by Young Jeezy and Jay-Z — he used the Serato Scratch Live program and a pair of time-coded control records on his Technics 1200 turntables to execute a series of precise cuts and scratches. “It’s all digital, but the sound, the touch, everything’s the same as we used to get with vinyl back in the day,” he said.

Some of the biggest names in hip-hop and R&B, from 50 Cent to TLC to Mary J. Blige, have made the pilgrimage to Mr. Farrell’s basement to record and mix hits, a fact well documented by the rows of platinum-sales plaques and Ascap songwriting awards on his walls. But his more buttoned-down neighbors would never know it. “I try to keep a real low profile,” he said, casually dressed in a gray T-shirt, gray shorts and black slippers, a diamond stud adorning his left earlobe.

He made the move from his native Mount Vernon, N.Y., in 1990, at the height of his success as the D.J. of Heavy D & the Boyz. “I was one of the first out here in Alpine,” he said. “There was no one doing hip-hop out here back then. I used to have to give people real specific directions to get out here to do a session.”

Seventeen years later they all know the way. Hip-hop has come to Bergen County full force, and this tiny, affluent town has blossomed into the favored bedroom community of rap’s moneyed set, including artists like Sean (Diddy) Combs, Lil’ Kim and Fabolous and music executives like Andre Harrell and Damon Dash. Giving a tour of his home and recording complex, Mr. Farrell pointed out the loft space where Mr. Combs used to sleep. “As a matter of fact Puffy used to live with me for about a year or two,” he said, using Mr. Combs’s now-retired nom de rap.

These days Mr. Combs hardly needs to crash on a homeboy’s sofa. The house he recently bought here, for a reported $7 million, is a 17,000-square-foot hilltop mansion with eight bedrooms, nine bathrooms, indoor and outdoor pools (complete with waterfall), racquetball and basketball courts, a home theater, a wine cellar and a six-car garage.

The rapper-turned-C.E.O. Andre Harrell says it all started in nearby Englewood. “The first attraction was the glamour of the Hollywood in Jersey that Eddie Murphy created,” he said. When Mr. Harrell moved to Alpine in 1990, however, he found something quite different. “The trees and the rugged kind of nature had a serenity. If you came from an environment of any sort of urban blight, it made you feel like you’ve finally made it and you’re at peace. It was so serene and storybooklike. It was the kind of thing you grew up watching on television. You said, ‘O.K., this is what the American dream is.’ ”

Fabolous, the rapper who grew up as John Jackson in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, said the seclusion and serenity in Alpine remain a major attraction for the younger generation of hip-hop stars. “It’s a quieter environment,” he said. “It’s being able to get away from the whole hustle and bustle of the city. It puts you in a different zone, into a real comfort zone when you’re working.”

The town has long been defined by its deliberately low profile. There is no thriving downtown, no velvet-rope restaurants, no reason to come here unless you belong. Even the mail knows its place: in other towns, civil servants might stride right up to your home and drop off your letters, but in Alpine, where homes are preceded by heavy gates and long driveways, your letters are respectfully held for you until you send someone for them.

Lately, however, the town has begun appearing in both lyrics and news reports. On her song “Aunt Dot,” Lil’ Kim name-checked it: “Come on Shanice, I’m takin’ you to my house in Alpine,” she rapped. And last year, when she was released from a federal prison, reporters trailed her back to her luxurious Alpine town house, where she served 30 days on house arrest.

IT marks a strange moment in the evolution of hip-hop when its stars view Ivy League-educated, old-money establishment figures as the most desirable neighbors. And it’s a strange moment in the evolution of American capital when that old-money establishment begins to view the hip-hop stars the same way.

But on one level at least it makes perfect sense, given the mainstreaming of a once underground musical genre and its celebration of C.E.O. culture. “I don’t buy out the bar, I bought the night spot/I got the right stock,” Jay-Z raps on his new album.

Jeff Chang, the author of the hip-hop history “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop,” said: “Rap fortunes form as powerful an American myth as is the creativity of poverty. When these rap entrepreneurs move to Alpine, they embody a new way of envisioning the classic American capitalist story. It’s why Russell Simmons and Diddy have called their clothing lines ‘urban aspirational.’ ”

On a freezing January afternoon Wendy Credle, an entertainment lawyer and real estate agent who has lived in the Alpine area for years, and Jade Stone, a bank loan officer, offered a reporter a driving tour. “The land value out here is through the roof,” Ms. Credle said. “I know people that tear down their own house and rebuild, because they’ve got such amazing property value in the land.”

The new houses resemble Mediterranean villas or small hotel complexes, with immense indoor-outdoor pools and garages that could double as airplane hangars. That kind of room, Ms. Credle said, “affords you the head space to be creative.”

Ms. Stone, who helped secure mortgages for leading rappers like Cam’ron and Biggie Smalls, said it had not always been an easy move to make: “A few years ago, I had a client — she was a major artist too — that had excellent credit, over $2 million in the bank, was buying a house for a million-five, and because she was a new, young artist, the underwriter didn’t want to give her a mortgage.” No longer, she said. “I would say that now the banks are fighting for these guys. If I bring in a client like Jim Jones” — a rapper who is part of Cam’ron’s crew — “you’ll have three or four banks competing to do his mortgage.”

In part that is a matter of pure arithmetic. “The entry level now, they’re making $20 million,” Ms. Stone said. “The entry level back then, they were making maybe a million, so they bought a three- or four-hundred-thousand-dollar town house. Then as they got bigger, like Kim, they moved up to a $800,000 town house. Then they bought the million-five home.”

And what about the other side of the hip-hop lifestyle, the partying that earned Mr. Combs the ire of some of his Hamptons neighbors? “There’s no issue where he is now,” Ms. Credle said, explaining that in the Hamptons his guests had to park on the street. “On his estate now, trust me, he’s got room to park as many guests as he wants.” It’s all very discreet. (And fittingly, through a publicist, Mr. Combs declined to comment for this article.)

Experts say the phenomenon of the newly rich gravitating toward country-club enclaves like Alpine is well established in American society. “The old adage is ‘crowding into the winner’s circle,’ ” said Jim Hughes, dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. “And so these superaffluent communities are very desirable for the big winners in our society, and there’s always the contrast between the old money and new money.” Especially in the case of hip-hop stars, many of whom insist they’ll never lose touch with their street roots.

But despite these contrasts, Mr. Hughes said, these groups have more in common than it might seem. “You have the new ultra-wealthy whose wealth may have come from sports and entertainment rather than conventional business like the corporate chieftains, lawyers, hedge-fund managers and the like. But where they want to live reflects the same values. They want to live with other winners in society. They want to live in the prestige areas. They want to live in areas that are somewhat secluded and offer them protection from citizens like you and I.”

INCORPORATED in 1903, Alpine started out as a sleepy, wooded outpost. In 1937 Frank Sinatra had his first important gig here at the Rustic Cabin, a roadhouse where he did double duty as headwaiter. Today the population of 2,183 is still overwhelmingly white (77 percent, according to the 2000 United States census, compared with 19 percent Asian, 2.5 percent Latino and 1.5 percent African-American). But the roadhouse era is long gone.

In 2005 Alpine’s ZIP code, 07620, was identified by American Demographics magazine as the seventh most affluent in the country. And a high percentage of the black homeowners are celebrities from the worlds of music, film and sports, like Chris Rock, Stevie Wonder, Wesley Snipes, Gary Sheffield and Patrick Ewing.

Still, the public culture of celebrity does not seem to have followed them home. “Alpine was always a pretty sleepy place, and that’s the way we try to keep it,” said Paul Tomasko, the town’s mayor. “You mentioned Stevie Wonder. He has owned a house here for quite a while now, but we rarely see him around. In fact I’ve never seen him here. You mentioned Chris Rock. I’ve seen him a total of one time in all the years that he has lived here.”

Mr. Farrell said music industry heavyweights run into one another at places like Dimora Ristorante, in Norwood, or the Kiku sushi house in Alpine. They say hello at the post office. That’s about it.

The adjacent towns of Bergen County have their own constellation of hip-hop stars. Wyclef Jean, Reverend Run and Ja Rule are Saddle River residents. Mary J. Blige has a mansion in Cresskill. Yet even among these elite addresses, Alpine has a distinct cachet. One of New Jersey’s leading real estate agents, Michele Kolsky-Assatly of Coldwell Banker, said that had to do with its limited housing supply. The last remaining privately held country clubs were sold off in the past few years and turned into Alpine’s newest cul de sac neighborhoods. “There is no more land in eastern Bergen County,” she said. “It is gone. The land is finished.”

Ms. Kolsky-Assatly, who has worked with Damon Dash and Jay-Z, added that unlike older communities in Westchester County or Long Island, these new neighborhoods — which she says her clientele prefers — have no history of discrimination. “There’s no historical anything,” she said. “This is all new.”

Though the median house price in Alpine has been estimated by Forbes at more than $1.7 million, real estate experts say the numbers are now much higher. “This side of the street is Cresskill; this side is Alpine,” Ms. Kolsky-Assatly said during a recent drive. “These are all two-acre lots, each worth between two and a half to three million dollars for the land alone. On the Cresskill side the houses go for five million and change; on the Alpine side they go for double that.” But taxes are low: there are few public school students and a minuscule police force.

Hip-hop is a culture that emerged amid urban deprivation. From the bombed-out wasteland of the South Bronx in the mid-’70s, a young generation created new beats from the breaks in old funk and disco records, often pirating power from street lamps for “park jams” where the likes of Grandmaster Flash would spin.

They dreamed of something better, but it was all relative. “When we were starting out with Heavy D,” Mr. Farrell said, “I remember guys rapping about Jettas like it was this almost unattainable car.” Big Bank Hank of the Sugar Hill Gang, in the seminal “Rapper’s Delight,” boasted of having “a color TV, so I can see the Knicks play basketball.”

Can leafy suburbs and 21st-century mansions be equally conducive to that creative process? Mr. Farrell shrugged: “By the time you’re getting ready to make records, you’ve pretty much lived a whole lifetime of music culture. You’ve been in the streets, you’ve been in the clubs. So at the end of the day you can go into Sony studios in Manhattan or come to my place.”

In designing Mini Mansion Recording, he said, he attempted to bring the best aspects of several popular hip-hop recording spots to Bergen County, right down to the 1980s vintage Pac-Man video game in the studio lounge. And he modeled his mixing console on that of Greene Street Recording, where Hank Shocklee recorded Public Enemy.

But what about lyrical content? Can a rapper really stay true to his street roots when his neighbors are horseback-riding hedge-fund managers and wild deer are scampering across his dew-covered front lawn?

“First of all, when you talk about New Jersey, you’re not talking about Beverly Hills,” Mr. Harrell said. “The influence of the urban experience is 30 minutes away, but you don’t have to be in the noise all the time.” He added, “You have to have quiet as an artist to hear your inner voice.”

And Fabolous said he had not entirely isolated himself. “I still go back to Brooklyn all the time,” he said, “just to remind myself how far I’ve come and get inspiration from that. And I don’t think if I see a deer on my lawn, it will shake me too much.” He added, laughing, “If I do see a deer, it might be something funny I can put in a rhyme.”

Correction: February 11, 2007

Because of an editing error, the continuation of a front-page article in Arts & Leisure today about Alpine, N.J., and the hip-hop stars who live there, omits a passage at the bottom of the third column and also omits the final three words of the article.

The first passage should read: “Hip-hop is a culture that emerged amid urban deprivation. From the bombed-out wasteland of the South Bronx in the mid-’70s, a young generation created new beats from the breaks in old funk and disco records, often pirating power from street lamps for ‘park jams’ where the likes of Grandmaster Flash would spin.”

The last paragraph should read: “And Fabolous said he had not entirely isolated himself. ‘I still go back to Brooklyn all the time,’ he said, ‘just to remind myself how far I’ve come and get inspiration from that. And I don’t think if I see a deer on my lawn, it will shake me too much.’ He added, laughing, ‘If I do see a deer, it might be something funny I can put in a rhyme.’ ”