Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll get a look at the Bronx Music Hall, the first brand-new music performance space to open in that borough in more than 50 years.
The 250-seat music performance space that is opening tonight in the Melrose section of the Bronx began with a cassette recording that was played at a staff meeting of a nonprofit organization. This was in the early 2000s, when cassette tapes were still a thing.
The tape was a sampling of the musical legacy of the Bronx — music that had been written or performed there.
“Everyone’s eyes lit up,” recalled Nancy Biberman, who at the time was the president of the nonprofit, the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation.
She remembers telling herself after the meeting that “maybe we are thinking too narrowly about what community development could mean — it’s not just bricks and mortar.” That realization morphed into thinking about what tenants would want besides basic needs like food, health care and education. What would make them happy?
WHEDco, as Biberman’s group is known, decided that music was an answer and incorporated the venue that is opening tonight in space adjacent to the Bronx Commons development, which has 305 below-market-rate apartments built on vacant city land that had been set aside for housing.
But Bronx Commons was designed with more than housing in mind. There is amphitheater-style seating in two plazas that can be used for outdoor performances. Space was also set aside in the complex for a dance studio, a recording studio and postproduction facilities — and a green room for performers.
And there is the new performance space, the Bronx Music Hall. WHEDco says it is the first new independent music venue in the Bronx in more than 50 years.
Tonight Biberman, now the president emerita of WHEDco, will moderate a panel discussion about how the music hall evolved. The discussion will be followed by a ribbon-cutting ceremony and performances by the hip-hop artists Grandmaster Cas and MC Sha-Rock, as well as by Uptown Vinyl Supreme, which calls itself a “vinyl DJ collective” that pays homage to the analog roots of music, and by the Afro-Haitian band Kong.
“Finally,” said Bobby Sanabria, the Grammy Award-nominated bandleader who is a co-artistic director of the Bronx Music Heritage Center, set up by WHEDco when the Bronx Music Hall was being planned. “I say ‘finally’ because we were delayed because of Covid.”
The pandemic hit just after tenants had moved into Bronx Commons and long after the music heritage center had taken up residence in a storefront in another building WHEDco had developed. Sanabria said that when Biberman offered him the co-artistic director post, she asked what he wanted to do. “I said I’d do what Wynton is doing at Jazz at Lincoln Center,” referring to Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. “The only difference is to be Bronx-centric. It won’t be just jazz. It will be all forms of music.”
That will reflect the Bronx that was mapped out — literally — by Elena Martinez, also a co-artistic director. She counted more than 20 theaters and clubs that once flourished but closed as the Bronx deteriorated. Biberman said that together, those venues had accounted for more than 20,000 seats where Bronxites could hear live music close to home.
The map of long-gone venues that Martinez compiled is, Biberman said, a portrait of the history of “migration, resettlement and cultural innovation” in the Bronx: Puerto Ricans and Cubans brought mambo and salsa, West Indians brought calypso, and African Americans brought jazz along with rhythm and blues. “The map shows a decidedly different portrait than the tired narrative of urban decay, she said,” Biberman said.
She cited Mark Naison, a professor of history and African and American Studies at Fordham University, who had made the cassette tape that put WHEDco on the path to building the Bronx Music Hall. Sanabria also mentioned Naison as having said that at one time, the Bronx had at least as many nightclubs, dance halls and catering halls as Manhattan.
“We have some great venues in the Bronx now — Lehman College, Hostos Community College,” Sanabria said, “but there’s only one place that has ‘Bronx’ in its official title — the Bronx Music Hall. It something you can see from the street.”
Weather
Expect a sunny sky with a high in the upper 60s. This evening, the sky will be mostly clear, and temperatures will near the low 50s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended today (for Sukkot).
The latest New York news
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A report finds widespread corruption among shelter operators
An extensive review by New York City’s Department of Investigation found that self-dealing, nepotism and conflicts of interest are rife among the nonprofit groups that run the city’s $4 billion network of homeless shelters.
The report found that some shelter operators paid themselves more than $700,000 a year. One nonprofit group awarded millions of dollars in city business to a security company tied to one of the group’s executives, allowing him to collect nearly $200,000.
Another nonprofit had at least five relatives of senior employees on the payroll, including the child and a niece of its executive director.
The city outsources the operations of its sprawling shelter network to about 90 nonprofit groups that handle day-to-day operations. But as homelessness climbed to record levels and city spending on shelters ballooned, some nonprofit operators found ways to abuse the system, the report found.
The city began its review three years ago, shortly after a New York Times investigation revealed that shelter executives were enriching themselves at taxpayers’ expense.
The Times told how a prominent homeless shelter operator named Victor Rivera had amassed more than $274 million in city funding while treating his nonprofit as a personal fief.
Ten women — including employees and women who lived in shelters run by Rivera’s organization, the Bronx Parent Housing Network — had accused him of sexual assault or harassment, The Times found.
Rivera had also hired his family members, steered contracts to close associates and intertwined his nonprofit organization with other for-profit ventures he ran.
He was charged in 2021 in a criminal bribery and kickback scheme, pleaded guilty in 2022 and was sentenced to more than two years in prison.
METROPOLITAN diary
Unfazed
Dear Diary:
I was holding onto a pole on a crowded 1 train when it stopped abruptly between stations.
Caught by surprise, I completely lost my balance and landed on the lap of an older man who was wearing a three-piece suit and had an unlit cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth.
Embarrassed, I jumped up and apologized profusely.
The man was unfazed.
“That’s what I’m here for,” he said, and returned to reading his newspaper.
— Tara Greenway
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. Lauren Rosenfield will be here on Monday. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post A New Venue Celebrates the Sound of the Bronx appeared first on New York Times.
