Black History Month
Sugar Hill, Harlem: Take the A Train
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008For a flat fee, you can sit on the NYC subway’s longest train line — the A train — from 207th St in Inwood all the way out to the Atlantic Ocean at Far Rockaway. I haven’t done this yet, but Kevin P., a Listings Agent at RDNY.com who lives in Inwood, has done […]
Manhattan and the Bronx: Where the Irish met Africans and Tap Dancing was Born
Monday, February 25th, 2008Five Points, the area near Columbus Park in downtown Manhattan so lovingly portrayed in The Gangs of New York, is nowadays part of Chinatown. The movie faithfully shows you the violence, squalor, filth, and poverty of The Points, but it missed the vibrancy of NYC’s melting pot. In the movie, Leonardo DiCaprio and […]
New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago . . . and Corona!
Monday, February 18th, 2008Jazz music is uniquely American, a blend of all the music immigrants brought to this country. New Orleans, Kansas City, and Chicago are the cities that are most identified with jazz, and now — yay! — I can add Corona to this list. Louis Armstrong moved to 34-56 107th St in Corona, Queens (that’s his […]
Harlem’s Famous Street Names
Monday, February 11th, 2008More history to honor Black History Month.
Manhattan was urbanized by the Dutch in the 1600s and they named this part of the island after the largest tulip-growing town back home: Haarlem. Tulips were a huge, HUGE business for The Netherlands back then. Really.
In the 1920s, NYC’s Harlem became the center of a conflagration of brilliance […]
Morris Park, Bronx: The Last Poets and the Birth of Hip Hop
Friday, February 1st, 2008I first heard this record back in the days of vinyl. It came from a friend’s older sibling’s or maybe parents’ record collection. I was in 10th grade in Alaska at the time, and this music and was the strangest thing we’d ever heard. We all loved it even though none of us knew […]