If Hip-Hop culture has turned thirty years old then someone needs to seriously sit down with Hip-Hop and discuss it’s plans for the future. After three decades of making some people ridiculously wealthy we find that Hip-Hop is about to evicted from it’s home. Hip-Hop was too busy partying and having fun to think about securing a stake in the ownership of it’s history.
Peep this story via Nah’Right Lite…
Will Gentrification Spoil the Birthplace of Hip-Hop?
It’s not just in the Bronx where Hip-Hop’s landmarks are being assailed by greedy land developers, but here in the boro of Brooklyn where thanks to frontman SHAWN CARTER, Forest City Ratner Corp. is determined to change the Brooklyn skyline forever. Everybody already knows about the Atlantic Yards project that will host a sports arena and hundreds of residential units.
There’s also a project in downtown Brooklyn called MetroTech that is also spearheaded by the same former slumlord turned developer BRUCE RATNER. In this project RATNER has decided to transform Brooklyn into a technology hub. Corporations like Chase and Verizon have already leased tens of thousands of square feet of office space. One of the buildings in the second phase of MetroTech’s footprint is a legendary Brooklyn landmark. The Albee Square Mall.
Albee Square Mall (courtesy of UnKut.Com)
Immortalized by the classic Juice Crew anthem of the same name, the Albee Square Mall is where many Brooklynites bought their first sneakers. It’s where I bought my 18k gold toothcap. That shit was so gangsta. Shouts to the Jews from Lebanon. If you are ever in the ‘hood and you need to copp some shit you should fucks with them. All the other Jews and the Sikh Indians are for the fucking birds. They show you contempt even when you are spending your hard earned money with them.
Anyhoo, Albee Square Mall was a hotspot in the eighties. You had to roll through there deep or on the low solo creep. After school the mall was on smash with kids from Westinghouse high school. Cats from Farragut and Walt Whitman Houses(Fort Greene) would patrol the mall as well. No place was more alive with danger and excitement every day. Those days are long past but Albee Square and Fulton Mall still remain. It’s one of the areas that Disney never corrupted with it’s clandestine supremacy motifs. There’s no Target or IKEA yet but if RATNER has his way the Fulton Mall will become upscale and unaffordable, just like Manhattan.
The Hip-Hop generation needs to grow up and reclaim the places where the culture was born inside of them. Don’t waste the intellectual equity that has been rendered by so many artists and creative peoples. Holler at your local politicians and tell them that affordable housing is a must now. Not now, right now.
MIKE KYSER is arranging for DP to be a contestant on the new (white) Rapper Show.
