📍243 West 63rd Street, New York, NY 10023, USA
1922 – 1972“In 1922, when I was about four, my family moved from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, to New York, and we settled in a small ground-floor apartment at 243 West 63rd Street, in the Phipps Houses, in San Juan Hill, a crowded Black neighbourhood on the West Side, near the Hudson. San Juan Hill was full of music: Caribbean bands, church choirs and stride pianists, and the Jungles Casino, where James P. Johnson played. I lived in that apartment for most of my life. I started playing piano at about six, and took lessons from a neighbour, Alberta Simmons, who taught me stride in the style of Fats Waller and James P. Johnson. I went to Stuyvesant High School, which was hard to get into, but I left to play music, touring with an evangelist and then playing at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, where we created bebop. Later I married Nellie, and we raised our children, Toot and Barbara, in the same apartment. My piano, a rented Steinway baby grand, took up much of the kitchen and stuck into the front room, its lid piled with music, papers, laundry and dishes, and I composed there, at all hours, Round Midnight, Ruby, My Dear and many more. Most of San Juan Hill was torn down for Lincoln Center and new housing, but the Phipps Houses survived, and I lived there until 1972. The city named the corner where I lived Thelonious Sphere Monk Circle, though the sign left out an O, and Lincoln Center, built on my old neighbourhood, now celebrates the music of San Juan Hill.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today