11/8/11 - Grantee U-HAB helps save the birthplace of hip-hop
The Trust made grants in 2008 and 2011 to
Urban Homesteading Assistance Board to preserve affordable housing, including the apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx. Alice Speri of the
New York Times reports on its recent victory.
After a long struggle, ownership of a Bronx building known as the birthplace of hip-hop, which had fallen into neglect and foreclosure, was taken over on Monday by a group that specializes in preserving working-class housing.
The building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Morris Heights neighborhood was, in the early 1970s, the home of D.J. Kool Herc, whose community room parties were pivotal to the early development of hip-hop.
But in recent years, the 102-unit complex had become a symbol for aggressive investment practices and property neglect, so much so that Senator Charles E. Schumer recently called it “the birthplace of predatory equity.”
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