Kool Herc Trying to Save The Birthplace of Hip-Hop

17 years ago view-show 616,968

By Quibian Salazar-Moreno

      The godfather of hip-hop DJ Kool Herc threw his very first party on August 11, 1973 in the community room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, New York. This is where hip-hop was born and later spilled out to the parks in the neighborhood, and even later became a worldwide phenomenon. Now Herc is trying to have the building where it all started protected as a historic landmark to save it from any changes that would affect its character according to the New York Times.

      “This is where it came from,” Herc told the Times. “This is it. The culture started here and went around the world. But this is where it came from. Not anyplace else.”

      The reason that Herc, his sister Cindy, and the 100 residents of the building want it protected is because the owner announced that the owners would leave the city’s subsidy program, which makes the building affordable for low and moderate income families to live. The owners want to offer housing on the open market, making rent increase immensely. Even though getting the building registered with the National Register of Historic Places wouldn’t make rent go down, it would protect the building from any changes, which would be necessary if the landlords want to get families with a high income in there.

      “That place means everything,” hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Caz told the Times. “You can look at it objectively and say it could have happened somewhere else. Maybe. But this is where it did happen. As far as government and what they consider important, who knows? But for something that saturated the world culture, that went from one building to the world, I would want to hold on to the historical significance of that building.”

 

The Real Fergie Calls Out BEP’s Fergie

 

      When Fergie dropped her debut album, “The Dutchess”, last year, people actually thought that the real “Fergie”, Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York and part of the Royal British Family, was releasing an album. Ferguson was perplexed by the album and called up Fergie herself.

      "When I heard that Fergie was not only calling herself Fergie, but called her album ‘The Dutchess,’ I thought: Right. She owes me. It’s one thing to call yourself Fergie, but another to take the duchess title," Ferguson told the New York Daily News. "I called her up and said, ‘Fergie, this is Fergie. You are naughty, naughty, naughty for using my name. I can’t have you on London Bridge, wearing a tiara and calling yourself Fergie! But I have a way you can make it up to me. You can come to Cipriani and do a concert for the Sarah Ferguson Foundation. And she was absolutely lovely! She said that her parents were teachers, and that she would love to do it – and kept her word."

      Fergie showed up at Cipriani’s in New York last week to perform at the Wall Street concert series which benefits UNICEF and the Sarah Ferguson Foundation.