On the evening of August 11, 1973, inside the first-floor recreation room of an affordable housing tower at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in Morris Heights, an eighteen-year-old Jamaican-born DJ named Clive Campbell—known to the neighborhood as DJ Kool Herc—set up two turntables and a pair of towering Shure vocal master speaker columns to raise back-to-school clothes money with his sister Cindy.

Using a technique he called "The Merry-Go-Round," Herc isolated the percussive instrumental "break" of funk records by James Brown and the Incredible Bongo Band, switching seamlessly between two identical copies of the same vinyl record so the breakbeat stretched on indefinitely for breakdancers (b-boys and b-girls) while an MC worked the microphone. In that single Bronx recreation room, hip-hop culture was born.

Today, standing outside 1520 Sedgwick Avenue (officially co-named Hip Hop Boulevard) is the starting point for one of New York City’s essential cultural walks. From Sedgwick Avenue, head east toward the Grand Concourse—the magnificent four-mile-long, 180-foot-wide boulevard modeled in the 1890s after the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the Grand Concourse became the world capital of residential Art Deco architecture. Walk between 161st and 167th Streets to admire masterpieces by architect Horace Ginsbern, including The Fish Building (1150 Grand Concourse, featuring colorful mosaic murals of aquatic life around its entrance) and the curved limestone corners, sunken lobbies, and geometric metalwork of the Concourse Historic District.

At 1040 Grand Concourse (at 165th Street), step inside The Bronx Museum of the Arts. Founded in 1971 to bring world-class visual art directly to the borough, the museum features an accordion-like glass-and-steel facade designed by Arquitectonica and houses over 2,000 contemporary works by artists of African, Asian, and Latin American ancestry—with admission 100% free to every visitor year-round.

Finish your afternoon a few stops south in Melrose at the Bronx Documentary Center (614 Courtlandt Ave at E 151st St). Founded by veteran conflict photojournalist Michael Kamber inside a former storefront, this independent gallery mounts deeply moving, world-renowned photojournalism exhibitions, film screenings, and community talks.