The Bridge: Queensbridge Houses and the Making of Illmatic

Ninety six buildings packed into the blocks around you make up what opened in nineteen thirty nine as the largest public housing development in North America. Queensbridge Houses holds roughly three thousand one hundred units and, at its peak, something like seven thousand residents, making it less a housing project than a small city of its own, tucked beneath the bridge for which it is named.

Starting in the nineteen eighties, Queensbridge became an unlikely center of hip hop. Producer Marley Marl lived here and built the Juice Crew, a collective of rappers and D J's who recorded out of his apartment and helped define the sound of New York rap in that decade. The neighborhood kept producing talent long after Marley Marl's heyday. A kid named Nasir Jones, who grew up in these buildings and went by Nas, released his debut album in nineteen ninety four. Titled Illmatic, it drew almost entirely on his life inside Queensbridge, and is now regarded by many critics as the greatest hip hop album ever made. Around the same years, the duo Mobb Deep, also raised in these towers, added their own account of life here to the catalog of music that came out of this one housing complex.

Few public housing developments anywhere in the country can claim to have shaped an entire genre of American music the way Queensbridge has. The buildings on your left and right, with their uniform brick facades and small courtyards, do not look like a cultural landmark from the road, but for several generations of hip hop artists, this was the place that explained where they came from.