The boogie down continues in a new concert venue.
The $15.4 million and 14,000-square-foot Bronx Music Hall hosts its grand opening weekend beginning this Friday. The venue in Morrisania includes a performance theater that can host 250 people, a lobby and exhibition hall, a recording studio and post-production room. Two adjacent plazas with amphitheater-style seating allow for outdoor performances. Youth and adults can also participate in music and dance classes.
In a borough once packed with performance spaces, the Bronx Music Hall joins the Lehman College Performing Arts Center as one of just a handful of concert halls. It completes Bronx Commons, a $165 million development that included 305 units of subsidized housing, 26,500 sq.ft. of retail space, a 150-seat 3-K and pre-K school and a community support and training center. Construction began in 2017.
It is owned and operated by the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDco), a community development organization.
The grand opening weekend will host several performances, including Afro-Haitian roots music band Kongo, the Bobby Sanabria Multiverse Big Band and Grupo Maburuaña. Sanabria and Elena Martínez, the co-artistic directors at WHEDco’s Bronx Music Heritage Center, will curate programming at the new venue.
The idea of the Bronx Music Hall began at a WHEDco staff meeting more than a decade ago, when founder Nancy Biberman invited Fordham University 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 told 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” in which performers honed their musical chops before taking their shows on the road. That circuit included the now-landmarked Bronx Opera House Hotel, which hosted a succession of nightclubs including Caravana Club, the Bronx Casino, and El Cerromar in its second-floor banquet hall.
“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,” said Sanabria, a 67-year-old Grammy-nominated percussionist and composer who grew up 10 blocks away from the new music space.
“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.”
But then, Sanabria said, the arson wave changed 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 difficult history leaves a sour taste in 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 said, noting that he wants people to understand how much culture and talent is born and exists in 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.”
