Morris Heights Tutors Come To You

1520 Sedgwick Avenue is just another apartment building to the uneducated and culturally disconnected eye. Located in Morris Heights, in the Bronx, this multi-story residential complex looks like many others in the New York City area, but to music lovers, 1520 Sedgwick Avenue is more than just a tall building—it is widely considered the birthplace of hip-hop.

It is a rare thing to be able to pinpoint an exact geographical location, down to longitude and latitude, for the birthplace of any movement. Jazz originates from New Orleans, for example, but conflicting histories about the first bar or club it was played in abound. 1520 Sedgwick, however, is perhaps the clearest defined location for any significant place in the history of musical movements.

Clive Campbell, who came to be known as DJ Kool Herc, is considered the father of hip-hop as a musical genre. He lived at the apartment building and threw frequent parties there in the summer of 1973, emceeing his own music, and is credited for being the first to introduce turntable and mixer music to the pop culture scene as a result of those parties and his new, innovative forms of music that resulted. He, along with friends who were perfecting a different form of singing, which came to be known as rap, came together and in a matter of a few years, had changed the course of music. Campbell, in the early 2000s, called the apartment building “the Bethlehem of hip-hop culture.”

Originally constructed as an affordable housing building, 1520 Sedgwick stands as a monument not only to the birthplace of hip hop, but a monument to a thriving culture of Morris Park. To maintain its roots among the working class, the building was named as a protected property by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation Department, and withstood the high-rent conversions that New York underwent starting in the 1990s. This was sadly short-lived, however, and eventually, when it entered market pricing in 2008, 1520 Sedgwick fell way to the housing bubble, which resulted in foreclosures and disrepair. It is currently under renovation, however, by the Urban Homesteading Alliance Board, to maintain its unique place in the history of Morris Heights and the history of hip-hop. Its tenants worked tirelessly to save the building and return it to its status as a low-income housing project, and still be an affordable place to live as rent rates continue to climb in the United States’ major cities. No doubt this building will continue to see action in the market and in the broader culture of hip-hop as more and more of its fans make pilgrimages to this iconic landmark.

Creativity can thrive in even the most innocuous of places—this is the lesson that 1520 Sedgwick teaches us. Tutors working in Morris Heights can foster this same creativity in each of their sessions with clients. They recognize the endless potential in every student, no matter how much they may struggle, and will fight to draw that potential out to turn bad grades around and see something promising result from the work they do together.