Famous people who grew up or lived in and around New York City

50 Cent1975–2000

📍 South Jamaica, Queens, NY, USA

Curtis James Jackson III was born in Queens in July 1975 and grew up in South Jamaica, a working-class neighbourhood in south-east Queens. His mother, Sabrina, was a teenager when she had…

Alexander Hamilton1802–1804

📍 Hamilton Grange, 414 West 141st Street, New York, NY 10031, USA

I was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis and raised on St Croix, the son of an unmarried mother and a Scottish father who left us; my mother died when I was a boy, and I went to work as…

Alicia Keys1981–1996

📍 Manhattan Plaza, Hell's Kitchen, New York, NY 10036, USA

Alicia Keys was born Alicia Augello Cook in Manhattan in January 1981 and grew up with her mother in Manhattan Plaza, a subsidised apartment complex on 43rd Street in Hell's Kitchen, built…

Althea Gibson1930–1946

📍 West 143rd Street, Harlem, New York, NY 10030, USA

I was born in August 1927 in Silver, South Carolina, where my parents, Daniel and Annie, were sharecroppers on a cotton farm. When I was three, after a bad harvest, we moved north to…

Barbra Streisand1942–1959

📍 Flatbush, Brooklyn, NY 11226, USA

Barbra Streisand was born in Brooklyn in April 1942. Her father, Emanuel, a teacher and scholar, died suddenly when she was just fifteen months old, and her mother, Diana, a former singer…

Cardi B1992–2010

📍 Highbridge, Bronx, NY 10452, USA

Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar was born in October 1992, the daughter of a Dominican father and a Trinidadian mother, and grew up between her grandmother's apartment in Washington Heights, in…

Carl Sagan1934–1951

📍 Brooklyn, New York, USA

I grew up in the Bensonhurst neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, the son of Sam Sagan, a garment worker from Ukraine, and Rachel Gruber, who had a fierce and focused intelligence that she…

DJ Kool Herc1967–1975

📍 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, Bronx, NY 10453, USA

Clive Campbell was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in April 1955, and grew up there absorbing the sound system culture of the city, where DJs played records through huge speakers at street…

Donald Trump1946–1950

📍 85-15 Wareham Place, Jamaica Estates, Queens, NY 11432, USA

Donald Trump spent his first four years in this two-storey Tudor-style house of brick and stucco on Wareham Place in Jamaica Estates, a leafy, affluent enclave of winding streets in Queens…

Dorothy Day1897–1980

📍 36 East 1st Street, New York, NY 10003, USA

I was born in 1897 in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in a working-class family. I became a journalist, then a socialist, then a Catholic convert, and in 1933 I co-founded the Catholic…

Edgar Allan Poe1846–1849

📍 Poe Cottage, 2640 Grand Concourse, Bronx, NY 10458, USA

My mother, an actress, died when I was two, and I was taken in, though never adopted, by John Allan, a Richmond merchant; we quarrelled until he cut me off, and I was poor all my life. In…

Estée Lauder1908–1946

📍 106-29 Corona Avenue, Corona, Queens, New York, NY 11368, USA

I was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in Corona, Queens, New York in 1908, the daughter of Max Mentzer, a Hungarian immigrant hardware store owner, and Rose Schotz Rosenthal, a Czech…

Fats Waller1904–1922

📍 West 134th Street, Harlem, New York, NY 10030, USA

I was born Thomas Wright Waller in Harlem in May 1904, the youngest of eleven children of Edward and Adeline Waller, only five of whom lived past childhood. My parents had come up from…

Grandmaster Flash1962–1979

📍 Fox Street, Bronx, NY 10459, USA

Joseph Saddler was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, in January 1958, and as a small child moved with his family to the Bronx. His father loved Caribbean and African American music and had a…

Humphrey Bogart1899–1917

📍 245 West 103rd Street, New York, NY 10025, USA

I was born on Christmas Day 1899 and grew up in a handsome brownstone at 245 West 103rd Street, on Manhattan's Upper West Side. My father, Belmont DeForest Bogart, was a respected heart…

Jay-Z1969–1990

📍 Marcy Houses, Brooklyn, NY 11206, USA

Shawn Corey Carter was born in Brooklyn in December 1969 and grew up in the Marcy Houses, a large public housing project of brick towers in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the youngest of four children…

Jean-Michel Basquiat1983–1988

📍 57 Great Jones Street, New York, NY 10012, USA

I was born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian father, Gerard, an accountant, and a Puerto Rican mother, Matilde, who took me to the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art from the age…

Jennifer Aniston1979–1987

📍 Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York, NY 10024, USA

Jennifer Aniston was born in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, in February 1969, the daughter of two actors: her father, John Aniston, a Greek-born actor later famous for the soap opera Days of…

Jennifer Lopez1969–1988

📍 Castle Hill, The Bronx, New York, NY 10462, USA

Jennifer Lopez was born in the Bronx in July 1969 and grew up in a two-storey house in Castle Hill, a working-class, largely Puerto Rican neighbourhood on a peninsula in the south-east…

John Lennon1973–1980

📍 The Dakota, 1 West 72nd Street, New York City, USA

The Dakota was one of the great addresses in New York, and I chose it deliberately — a building with history, with weight, overlooking Central Park from the Upper West Side. Yoko and I…

Jonas Salk1914–1934

📍 The Bronx, New York, NY, USA

I was born in October 1914 in East Harlem, New York, the eldest of three sons of Daniel and Dora Salk. My father worked in the garment trade, designing lace collars and blouses, and my…

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar1950–1965

📍 Dyckman Houses, Inwood, Manhattan, New York, NY 10034, USA

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. in Harlem in April 1947, the only child of Cora, a department-store price checker, and Ferdinand Sr., a transit police officer who…

Lady Gaga1986–2005

📍 68 West 68th Street, Manhattan, New York, NY 10023, USA

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta was born in New York City in March 1986 and grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in an Italian-American Catholic family, with her parents, Cynthia…

Langston Hughes1947–1967

📍 20 East 127th Street, Harlem, New York, NY 10035, USA

I grew up mostly with my grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas, a proud, poor woman who told me stories of the fight against slavery; my parents had separated, and I moved between Kansas…

Lou Gehrig1910–1925

📍 Washington Heights, Manhattan, New York, NY 10033, USA

I was the only one of my parents' four children to survive infancy, and my mother poured all her love and hopes into me. Heinrich and Christina Gehrig were German immigrants, and I was born…

Louis Armstrong1943–1971

📍 34-56 107th Street, Corona, Queens, NY 11368, USA

In March 1943, while I was away on the road, my wife Lucille put a down payment on a modest brick house at 34-56 107th Street in Corona, Queens, a working-class neighbourhood of Black…

Madonna1978–1983

📍 Upper West Side, New York, NY 10024, USA

Madonna Louise Ciccone was born in Bay City, Michigan, in August 1958, and grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, where her mother died when she was five. She studied dance at the University of…

Martin Scorsese1950–1964

📍 Elizabeth Street, Little Italy, New York, NY 10012, USA

Martin Scorsese was born in Flushing, Queens, in November 1942, the son of Charles and Catherine Scorsese, second-generation Sicilian-Americans who worked in Manhattan's garment district as…

Mike Tyson1976–1980

📍 Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York, NY 11212, USA

Mike Tyson was born in Brooklyn, New York, in June 1966, and when he was about ten, his family moved to Brownsville, then one of the poorest and most dangerous neighbourhoods in New York, a…

Nas1973–1994

📍 Queensbridge Houses, Long Island City, NY 11101, USA

Nasir Jones was born in Brooklyn in September 1973, the son of the jazz trumpeter Olu Dara and Ann Jones, and spent his first years in Crown Heights, where at about three or four he would…

Nicki Minaj1987–2000

📍 South Jamaica, Queens, NY, USA

Onika Tanya Maraj was born in Saint James, a lively district of Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, in December 1982. Her mother moved to New York first to make a home, and Onika stayed…

Paul Simon1945–1959

📍 Kew Gardens Hills, Queens, NY 11367, USA

Paul Simon was born in Newark, New Jersey, in October 1941, and in 1945 his family moved to Kew Gardens Hills, a quiet, largely Jewish neighbourhood of red-brick houses and tree-lined…

Roy Lichtenstein1923–1940

📍 Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York, NY 10024, USA

I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the son of a successful real estate broker, Milton, and Beatrice, a homemaker who had trained as a pianist. My sister Renée and I were taken…

Ruth Bader Ginsburg1933–1950

📍 Midwood, Brooklyn, NY 11230, USA

I grew up in a working-class neighbourhood of Flatbush and Midwood in Brooklyn, in a small house on East 9th Street, a few blocks from Ocean Parkway. My parents, Nathan and Celia Bader…

RZA1978–1993

📍 Park Hill, Staten Island, NY 10304, USA

Robert Fitzgerald Diggs was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in July 1969, and spent part of his early childhood with an uncle in North Carolina, who encouraged him to read and study. Back in…

Scarlett Johansson1984–2002

📍 Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York, NY 10014, USA

Scarlett Johansson was born in New York City in November 1984 and grew up in Greenwich Village, the historic Manhattan neighbourhood of brownstones, cafés, Washington Square Park and…

Sonny Rollins1930–1950

📍 Sugar Hill, Harlem, New York, NY, USA

I grew up in Harlem, in central Harlem and then up on Sugar Hill, in a musical family: my father played clarinet, my sister piano, my older brother violin. Sugar Hill in the 1930s and 40s…

Stan Lee1922–1939

📍 Washington Heights, Manhattan, New York, NY 10040, USA

I was born Stanley Martin Lieber in December 1922 in my parents' apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My parents, Jack and Celia, were Jewish immigrants from Romania. My father…

Stanley Kubrick1928–1946

📍 Grand Concourse, The Bronx, New York, NY 10457, USA

I was born in Manhattan in July 1928 and grew up in the Bronx, first in an apartment on Clinton Avenue and later in buildings off the Grand Concourse, the borough's grand boulevard of Art…

Sugar Ray Robinson1932–1940

📍 Harlem, Manhattan, New York, NY 10027, USA

I was born Walker Smith Jr. in May 1921, the youngest of three children of a farming family; my birth certificate says Ailey, Georgia, though I always said I was born in Detroit. My father…

The Notorious B.I.G.1972–1994

📍 226 St. James Place, Brooklyn, NY 11238, USA

I was born Christopher George Latore Wallace in Brooklyn in May 1972, and grew up in an apartment at 226 St. James Place, on a block of brownstones between Fulton Street and Gates Avenue in…

Thelonious Monk1922–1972

📍 243 West 63rd Street, New York, NY 10023, USA

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…

Timothée Chalamet1995–2013

📍 Manhattan Plaza, Hell's Kitchen, New York, NY 10036, USA

Timothée Chalamet was born in New York City in December 1995 and grew up in Manhattan Plaza, a subsidised apartment complex on 43rd Street in Hell's Kitchen, built for people working in the…