An opening date has been set for the exciting new Hip Hop Museum (UHHM) project in the South Bronx.
Located on the site claiming to be the birthplace of hip hop, the new $80 million museum, which is part of a larger $349 million mixed-use residential development called Bronx Point, will open sometime in 2024. According to Hyperallergic, the museum is being developed by Bronx native Rocky Bucano alongside Microsoft and MIT professor D. Fox Harrell to create an immersive and “technologically advanced interactive museum experience.”
Phase One of the Bronx Point development is expected to be completed by the end of next year. In total, the 22-story building will include over 1,000 residential units (around 540 of which are considered affordable), the museum (the exhibition spaces of which are designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates with the Hip Hop Architect, Michael Ford), 10,000 square feet of retail space, an education center, and an exterior Harlem River-adjacent esplanade designed by Marvel and Abel Bainnson Butz.
Funding for the museum came from a mix of public and private interests, including local luminaries such as Mayor Eric Adams (who kicked in $2 million) and the State Assembly (another $11 million) in addition to a total of $4.2 million that was taken from the Borough. Other than the museum, the most important feature of the site is the pedestrian greenway connecting to Mill Pond Park. The project has been a decade in the making and will be a welcome site in a once-blighted area that is now making positive strides thanks to the re-investment of locals such as Bucano.
“In the early concept phases and the years since then, we’ve been engaged with L+M, Type A and S9 Architects to deliver our best guess of what we would need,” Ralph Appelbaum Associates senior exhibition designer Rio Rocket Valledor told ENR in a recent preview. “It’s a reinterpretation of a traditional museum space. A remix, if you will.”
3 Comments
puhlease.
been by enough this thing as it's been going up to verify that it's hideous (though that only is really a view of the housing portion..)
It’s a cool concept for a museum, but I think the site really sucks (despite its historical significance). It’s in an area that is not really walkable. It feels cut off from the pedestrian street. As a hip hop head I’m excited to visit one day regardless of the underwhelming architecture.
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