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Groundbreaking ceremony for hip-hop museum in the Bronx
Construction is now officially underway for the permanent home of hip-hop in its birthplace of the Bronx.
NEW YORK - Musical luminaries including Nas, LL Cool J, and Fat Joe came out Thursday to the birthplace of hip-hop for a ground-breaking ceremony to launch the capital campaign for the new Universal Hip Hop Museum.
They joined a slew of politicians in the Bronx, where the now-global cultural force that is hip-hop has its roots.
"When I was a kid starting out my room was a museum," LL Cool J said. "So it doesn't surprise me but I'm grateful it happened."
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The museum is part of a $349 million mixed-use project along the waterfront in the South Bronx.
"It's just like you wait for someone else to do it and you wait forever," Chuck D said.
The first phase of the development, called Bronx Point, will provide affordable housing and public open space. It also is slated to include cultural and community-focused programming, including the permanent home of the Universal Hip Hop Museum.
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Grandmaster Flash said, "This thing we were doing was anti-everything else. Anti-everything else. Here we are almost 47 years later."
With the Associated Press