The Bronx has been through a lot since its founding in the late 19th century. From being a predominantly moderate-income area to a predominantly low-income area, the Bronx has experienced substantial development and investment in its housing stock and quality of life. In the late 1960s, housing inflation in New York City caused many immigrants to move from Manhattan to the Bronx, leading to a population boom and a fun fusion of musical genres. This fusion was not only between black and Latino cultures, but also between Caribbean culture, showing how life in the Bronx coexisted in neighborhoods across the city. The Bronx has a unique cultural capital that derives from immigration and the mixing of cultures.
It has a rich history of left-wing labor politics rooted in Jewish socialist ideals and labor activism. In the early 1930s, tenants in the area were struggling to pay rent, so they organized themselves through rent strikes, pickets, and clashes with police and landlords. These riots between tenants were perpetuated by the Colonia Cooperativa Obrera, known as the “Cooperatives”.Let's take a look at the population of the Bronx and the soundscape they lived in before hip hop. Rodríguez published the Bronx Trilogy, composed of shoe polishes, poems, etc., concrete pastures from the beautiful Bronx and the banks of Brook Avenue.
In much of the district, particularly in the South Bronx, buildings were abandoned or burned down (often by landlords who wanted to collect insurance) in alarming numbers. Thousands of young people attended these outdoor performances, which the police did not interrupt even though they were done without permission, and other talented DJs from the Bronx decided to follow their example. Campbell, when he created shocking percussion riffs at full volume, captured the sounds of communities experiencing a series of tragic circumstances that, at the time, were considered unique to the Bronx, but would soon spread across the country and the world. The development of the Bronx is directly related to its strategic location between New England and New York (Manhattan). Since then, the Bronx has always supported Democratic Party presidential candidates, starting with a 2-1 vote for Al Smith in 1928 (unsuccessful) followed by four 2-1 votes for Franklin D. Roosevelt (successful).One of the reasons why projects planned for the outskirts of South Bronx are unlikely to extend inland is that it has one of the highest densities of public housing in America.
The State University of New York Maritime College at Fort Schuyler (Throggs Neck), on the southeastern tip of the Bronx, is a national leader in maritime education and houses a Museum of Maritime Industry. Soon this mix of music from immigrant cultures spread from the Bronx to new neighborhoods such as Harlem, Flatbush, East Elmhurst and even Lower East Side. The Bronx Terminal Market is a shopping mall that encompasses less than one million square feet of retail space built on a 17-acre plot that formerly housed a wholesale fruit and vegetable market as well as former Bronx Detention House south of Yankee Stadium. Robert Moses began demolishing buildings in Spanish Harlem thus displacing tenants to the Bronx to develop public housing in an effort to eradicate slums. The Bronx Music Heritage Center is located in Crotona Park East in South Bronx on Louis Nine Boulevard next to historic Southern Boulevard. In 1970s Puerto Rican Black Jamaican and other Afro-Caribbean communities in Bronx began to influence different threads of hip hop culture. Learning about history of South Bronx has revealed politics failures and cycles of urban renewal.
