New York is set to add another major museum to the must-visit lists this decade. Plans are now going ahead to build the world’s first museum dedicated to hip hop music and culture in South Bronx – the birthplace of hip hop.
The Universal Hip Hop Museum is expected to break ground at the Bronx Point this year with completion mooted for 2023. The museum, a collaboration with Microsoft and the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality, plus artists such as Nas, Q-Tip, and LL Cool J., is operating temporarily in Bronx Terminal Market.
Visitors to the temporary exhibition are taken on an immersive journey through hip hop history from the 1970s to the present. The museum will also celebrate break dancing, graffiti artists, dee-jays, and MCs. Country music fans have Dollywood, Elvis lovers make the pilgrimage to Graceland, and electric guitar lovers can get weak-kneed over Jimi Hendrix's Stratocaster at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, yet there is no cultural institution dedicated to one of the most important and innovative musical genres in the US.
Director, Rocky Bucano, told The New York Post the Hip Hop Museum will generate tourism and tax revenues for the Bronx and New York. “The museum is part of the renaissance of the Bronx. The Bronx is coming back,” he said. “But the museum will be of the people and for the people.”
We expect further tourism draws for The Bronx in the coming years. People are already arriving en masse to visit 'The Joker stairs'. It’s also the birthplace of twenty-first-century cultural figures like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and American rapper, songwriter and media star, Cardi B.
