Under the Bridge

By the late nineteen-eighties, as the sounds and styles of hip-hop pervaded youth culture, budding stars jostled for position, and a curious internal debate swept the tristate area—where exactly had it begun? Though South Bronx block parties had long been given the credit, one song inadvertantly fed fans the rumor that hip-hop started in Queens. In MC Shan’s 1986 single, “The Bridge,” he raps, “You love to hear the story, again and again / Of how it all got started way back when / The monument is right in your face / Sit and listen for a while to the name of the place.” “The Bridge” was short for Queensbridge, America’s largest operating housing project, located in Long Island City; Shan was simply extolling the place where his Juice Crew “got started.” This erroneous origin story isn’t the complex’s only incongruity. At concerts and in clubs, Queensbridge persists as a misnomer, evoked to represent the entire borough: a rogue symbol of Queens’ scrappy tenacity and opaque borders.