The boogie down continues in a brand new live performance venue.
The $15.4 million and 14,000-square-foot Bronx Music Corridor hosts its grand opening weekend starting this Friday. The venue in Melrose features a efficiency theater that may host 250 folks, a foyer and exhibition corridor, a recording studio and post-production room. Two adjoining plazas with amphitheater-style seating permit for out of doors performances. Youth and adults may take part in music and dance courses.
In a borough as soon as full of efficiency areas, the Bronx Music Corridor joins the Lehman School Performing Arts Middle as one among only a handful of live performance halls. It completes Bronx Commons, a $165 million growth that included 305 items of backed housing, 26,500 sq.ft. of retail house, a 150-seat 3-Okay and pre-Okay college and a neighborhood assist and coaching heart. Building started in 2017.
It’s owned and operated by the Ladies’s Housing and Financial Improvement Company (WHEDco), a neighborhood growth group.
Son Bullerengue, a gaggle named after an Afro-Colombian dance, performs for Bronx highschool college students within the new Bronx Music Corridor’s 250-seat theater. Oct. 16, 2024. Credit score: Jonathan Custodio/THE CITY
The grand opening weekend will host a number of performances, together with Afro-Haitian roots music band Kongo, the Bobby Sanabria Multiverse Huge Band and Grupo Maburuaña. Sanabria and Elena Martínez, the co-artistic administrators at WHEDco’s Bronx Music Heritage Middle, will curate programming on the new venue.
The thought of the Bronx Music Corridor started at a WHEDco employees assembly greater than a decade in the past, when founder Nancy Biberman invited Fordham College professor and Bronx historian Mark Naison.
“That staff meeting — it was the beginning of many, many conversations we had with Mark and with others,” Biberman informed THE CITY. “What is it? Where is it? Where was it? Why is it not here anymore? What happened? … That process led us to do really basic field research, and we created a document called Lost Music Venues of The Bronx. What we found was that there were, at minimum, more than 20,000 seats where live music couldn’t be heard in the South Bronx that had been lost.
Prior to the disinvestment and abandonment of the 1970s, as profiteers burned Bronx apartment buildings and businesses for insurance payouts, the South Bronx had been a musical hub.
Borough historian Angel Hernandez said the history of music venues in The Bronx once included the fabled “subway circuit” through which performers honed their musical chops earlier than taking their reveals on the highway. That circuit included the now-landmarked Bronx Opera Home Resort, which hosted a succession of nightclubs together with Caravana Membership, the Bronx On line casino, and El Cerromar in its second-floor banquet corridor.
“When I was growing up there were a plethora of clubs, and not only clubs but catering halls, dance halls and, of course, you had church dances. You could make a living as a musician just by playing in The Bronx, particularly the South Bronx. At one time, The Bronx had as many or more nightclubs, catering halls and dance halls than Manhattan,” mentioned Sanabria, a 67-year-old Grammy-nominated percussionist and composer who grew up 10 blocks away from the brand new music house.
“You’re talking about places like the Concourse Plaza Hotel, which is right across from Yankee Stadium. They had a ballroom there, and major salsa dances would happen there. Then you had places like the 845 Jazz Club, which was the main jazz club in The Bronx. Everybody played there.”
However then, Sanabria mentioned, the arson wave modified all that:
“It just was horrible. I got lucky because I lived in the projects. You can’t burn down a project, but I lived on the 12th floor and me and my sister used to look out the window in the kitchen, watching, counting the fires,” he added. “What kind of entertainment is that for a kid? And then you hear the freakish sound of — the constant sound of fire trucks running through the streets.”
That troublesome historical past leaves a bitter style within the mouths of Bronxites like Sanabria.
“We still have that stigma of the fires and people still have a negative view of The Bronx, particularly the South Bronx. Jokes are always being made,” he mentioned, noting that he needs folks to grasp how a lot tradition and expertise is born and exists within the borough.
“Now, with the Bronx Music Hall, we hope to be part of that linchpin that helps to erase and eradicate that negative history and image that we have.”
Echoing a Bronx proverb, he added: “The Bronx makes it, and everybody takes it.”
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