Save the "Birthplace of Hip-Hop" : 1520 Sedgwick Ave.

Article courtesy of the New York Times Newspaper:

Hip-hop was born in the west Bronx. Not the South Bronx, not Harlem and most definitely not Queens. Just ask anybody at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue — an otherwise unremarkable high-rise just north of the Cross Bronx and hard along the Major Deegan.
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Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

The community room, where Kool Herc presided over turntables at parties in the 1970s, has been closed for renovations since last year. Across the city, owners of buildings like the one at 1520 Sedgwick are leaving subsidy programs.

“This is where it came from,” said Clive Campbell, pointing to the building’s first-floor community room. “This is it. The culture started here and went around the world. But this is where it came from. Not anyplace else.”

In February, tenants of the Sedgwick Avenue building, which has 100 units, were told that the owners planned to leave the Mitchell-Lama program. The building’s owners did not respond to several requests for comment for this article.

“That place means everything,” he said. “You can look at it objectively and say it could have happened somewhere else. Maybe. But this is where it did happen.”

To him it is already a landmark.

“As far as government and what they consider important, who knows?” he said. “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.”