DJ Kool Herc &amp; the South Bronx &mdash; August 11, 1973

Last verified: April 2026

The Founding Moment

On August 11, 1973, in the rec room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue (Morris Heights, the South Bronx), 18-year-old Clive Campbell — DJ Kool Herc — played his sister Cindy’s back-to-school party. By any plausible historical accounting, that evening is the founding moment of hip-hop as a distinct musical genre.

The Merry-Go-Round Technique

Herc’s innovation was the “Merry-Go-Round” technique — using two copies of the same record on two turntables to extend the percussion-heavy “break” section of a song indefinitely. By cueing the second turntable to the start of the break just as the first reached the end, Herc could loop the break section continuously. The technique laid down the foundation of the genre: the extended break became the canvas on which DJs and (later) MCs built the music.

The Merry-Go-Round became the technical foundation for everything that followed in hip-hop — from Grandmaster Flash’s scratching innovations through Afrika Bambaataa’s electro through KRS-One’s lyrical structures. Herc’s simple two-turntable insight is the genre’s ur-technique.

1520 Sedgwick Avenue

The address — 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in the Morris Heights section of the South Bronx — remains a residential building. The rec room where Herc spun his sister Cindy’s back-to-school party is part of NYC’s cultural-historical infrastructure in the same way Carnegie Hall, the Apollo, and Madison Square Garden are.

The block was officially co-named “Hip-Hop Boulevard” in 2016, formalizing the cultural-historical recognition of the site. The 50th anniversary of hip-hop in 2023 brought widespread celebration of the address; the city held part of its hip-hop 50th anniversary celebrations at Yankee Stadium and at the 1520 Sedgwick site itself.

Cannabis as Part of the Founding Culture

Cannabis is part of the South Bronx’s musical DNA from the start. The 1973 back-to-school party was a community event in a working-class Bronx neighborhood; cannabis was openly part of the social fabric, as it was throughout NYC’s working-musician communities going back to the Harlem viper era of the 1930s. Hip-hop’s emergence didn’t introduce cannabis to the Bronx — cannabis was already there. What hip-hop did was carry the cannabis-cultural connection forward into a new genre, threaded through the work of every major figure who emerged from the South Bronx scene.

The South Bronx Pioneers

Herc’s 1973 party laid the foundation; the South Bronx pioneers built the genre out from there:

Grandmaster Flash — technical innovations in scratching and beat-juggling
Afrika Bambaataa — the Universal Zulu Nation, electro, and the political consciousness of early hip-hop
KRS-One — lyrical complexity and the “edutainment” tradition
Grand Wizard Theodore — credited with originating the scratch as a deliberate musical technique (around 1975)
The Cold Crush Brothers, the Furious Five, the Funky 4 Plus 1 — the early MC crews

The Bronx’s Cannabis-Enforcement Context

The 1973 founding moment took place in a Bronx that was, even then, heavily policed for low-level drug offenses. The pre-MRTA cannabis-arrest concentration in the Bronx was among the highest in NYC; the 1990s and 2000s stop-and-frisk era’s Marihuana Possession in Public View arrests fell disproportionately on Bronx residents. The throughline from 1973 founding through 1990s hip-hop golden age through 2000s mass arrests through 2020s legalization-era equity licensing is the central story of cannabis policy in the borough.

Yankee Stadium and the 50th Anniversary

The city held part of its hip-hop 50th anniversary celebrations at Yankee Stadium in August 2023. The convergence of the genre’s 50th anniversary with the legal-cannabis era’s third year was not coincidence. Cannabis NYC’s Founding Director Dasheeda Dawson and others have explicitly drawn the cultural-political throughline between cannabis enforcement targeting Black and Latino communities, hip-hop’s emergence as the cultural response, and the equity-licensing program that the MRTA was designed to deliver.

The Bronx Today

The Bronx remains the most underserved borough relative to population in the licensed-dispensary count. CONBUD Bronx (Mott Haven), Freshly Baked NYC 2 (Belmont), Green Sun (Throgs Neck), and PharmaCann medical (Fordham Road) anchor the borough’s small but growing licensed-cannabis cluster. The cultural depth of the borough — from Herc’s 1973 party forward — is not yet matched by the operational-dispensary count. The Mayor’s FY27 budget projection of 50 additional NYC dispensaries in OCM’s queue may bring more openings to the Bronx through 2026. See The Bronx Borough Guide.

The Cultural Continuity

From the 1930s Harlem vipers through the 1950s Beats through the 1970s Greenwich Village High Times founding through the 1973 South Bronx party that birthed hip-hop, NYC has shaped most of how American culture thinks about cannabis. Herc’s 1520 Sedgwick Avenue moment is not separate from that lineage — it’s the next turn in it.