The Birth of the Bronx's Universal Hip Hop Museum

The old, shuttered Bronx Borough Courthouse was once something like the Goree Island of New York City: A point of no return for many black and Latino youth who, throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, were detained in its chambers before being sent off to feed the beast of mass incarceration. The young and restless Bronx denizens who were able to evade the courthouse’s rapture would go on to birth the streets-based culture of hip hop—a lifestyle of art, dance, and music that continues to hold tremendous social and artistic influence today.

Perhaps it’s only fitting, then, that some of the culture’s leading conservationists are taking over that Bronx courthouse to create a museum dedicated to hip hop—at least, that’s the hope. The building’s owner, Henry Weinstein, is currently working with the Universal Hip Hop Museum’s board of trustees to see if it’s feasible to eventually convert the century-old courthouse into a cultural arts center. One of the UHHM’s founding directors, rapper Kurtis Blow, recruited Mike Ford, a professor who teaches about the intersections of hip hop and architecture at Wisconsin’s Madison College, to lead the museum’s design.