NEW YORK — In the beige linoleum hallway, a fluorescent light flickers on and off as a woman saunters over to visit her neighbor. The elevator creaks and whines, then frees a gaggle of giggling girls. Downstairs in the laundry room, a young mother sorts her children's clothes, enjoying the room's warmth on a blustery day.
But for this west Bronx apartment building's residents, the comfort of home may not last.
The mostly low-income tenants are battling a millionaire investor over the future of this small but pricey slice of real estate near Yankee Stadium.
If the building is sold and taken out of its current affordable-housing program as planned, tenants fear rents will rise to unaffordable levels. To prevent that, they are trying to buy the building and turn it into a co-op.
It's a familiar New York story. Throughout the city, poorer residents have been squeezed in recent years as investors and developers have taken over low-income buildings and put them on the open market for higher rents, affordable-housing advocates say.
One angle that has helped residents raise money to buy this building is its historical significance: It is one of the birthplaces of hip-hop.
In August 1973, a hulking Jamaican American teenager named Clive Campbell started throwing back-to-school parties with his sister Cindy in their building, 1520 Sedgwick Ave.
Campbell, nicknamed Hercules because of his size, bought multiple copies of the same albums and, spinning his turntables, stitched together a new genre with a mix of music and break beats.
Soon teenagers were flocking to parties in the recreation room. Two-by-fours and metal crates served as chairs and tables, but no one was sitting down; the place was packed with dancing kids.
"It got a little out of control," said Campbell, who became known as DJ Kool Herc. And so music and turntables moved from Sedgwick Avenue to the nearby Twilight Zone club, and hip-hop spread throughout the city.
"We weren't doing [the parties] for money -- it was just about music," said Campbell, who is considered by many a founding father of hip-hop.
He sees the building on Sedgwick as a musical monument like Graceland or the Apollo Theater in Harlem. "This is part of the American dream," Campbell said.
This summer, state officials declared the building the "birthplace of hip-hop," making it eligible for national and state registers.
