San Juan Hill soon became a
neighborhood of bustling creativity. The area was so well-known by the
1930s that Duke Ellington and his orchestra recorded a song called “San
Juan Hill.” It’s reputedly where pianist James P. Johnson introduced a
dance called “The Charleston,” which swept the country in the 1920s.
It’s
also where the musical “Shuffle Along” debuted in 1921. It was an
all-Black show with an all-Black creative team, and when it transferred
to Broadway, it introduced jazz to the stages there, becoming a
sensation among the mixed-race audiences who came to see it. The 2016 version about the making of that musical, starred Audra McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell and Billy Porter.
Ram
Ramierez — who wrote songs for Billie Holiday, including “Lover Man” —
lived in the neighborhood with his family after they migrated from
Puerto Rico in the 1920s. Jazz pianist Thelonius Monk moved there as a
child around the same time, in 1922, and the neighborhood’s cramped
clubs became a crucible for BeBop, with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie
“Bird” Parker playing there.
Monk later raised his children in San
Juan Hill. His son, the drummer Thelonious Monk, Jr., spoke with WNYC
in 1984, two years after his father died, about growing up in the
neighborhood.
“What Amsterdam looked like back then — little
shops, drug store, ice cream parlor, little houses — teeming, like the
Lower East Side in the ’20s, crowded, full of life and colors and people
doing their daily business,” he said in an interview that’s now held by the NYC Municipal Archives.
By mid-century, the neighborhood had also become a center of Puerto Rican life, as large groups of migrants settled in the area.
“There were so many different kinds of people,” Monk said in the 1984 interview. “It was just a great, great neighborhood.”
He
remembered San Juan Hill as a place filled with performance. There were
puppet shows in the park, he said, and on summer evenings, a screen was
hung from a flagpole so residents could watch outdoor movies.
And
he remembered that everything changed when Robert Moses, then chair of
the New York City Committee on Slum Clearance, decided that San Juan
Hill was an ideal candidate for one of the nation’s largest “urban
renewal” projects.
“We called it ‘urban removal,’” Monk said. “Of
course, they told everyone they were going to refurbish the neighborhood
and everyone was going to move back. Of course everyone never moved
back. And the rents went sky high.”
***
Title I of the federal 1949 Housing Act allowed local governments to
take property through eminent domain — and provided some of the funds to
do it — as long as they then built middle-class housing for the
post-war population boom. The New York Times said, by the time the neighborhood was demolished, the city moved 7,000 families and 800 businesses out of the area.
Moderate-income
housing was built after the San Juan Hill tenements and brownstones
were leveled — but the centerpiece of the development was Lincoln
Center, which now sits on more than 16 acres, including LaGuardia High
School, and Fordham University’s Upper West Side campus.
The
Lincoln Center complex, which opened in 1962, was a citadel. Critics
noted that it was designed to separate itself from the Black and Latino
people who still lived in the area, particularly in the New York City
Housing Authority’s Amsterdam Houses, which were built in 1948 as part
of an earlier eminent domain project. While Lincoln Center’s east side
opens out onto a wide plaza with its iconic fountain, its western edge
is blocked by an uninviting, blank wall that runs along Amsterdam
Avenue.
