The Jungles

Howard French’s The Jungles reveals how the neighbourhood now encompassing New York’s Lincoln Centre fostered ground-breaking Black artists, among them Thelonious Monk (1917–1982).

In the late twentieth century, an artistic Black community settling in San Juan Hill–otherwise known as The Jungles–inspired some of the century’s greatest creative triumphs. The stride piano style was born, nurturing Monk’s musical genius. Under the guise of “urban renewal”, The Jungles was torn down. By the late 1950s, Monk’s musical genius had been recognised, and he had gained infamy by refusing to leave his apartment. But even still, The Jungles’ erasure felt irreversible, as did the history of its Black and Caribbean community.

The Jungles ultimately emerges as a new history of music in New York, and of New York itself. French’s magnificent recreation of Monk’s vanished world, at once a biography and an urban history, restores it to our cultural memory.

Howard W. French’s Born in Blackness was praised as:

• “[S]earing, humbling and essential reading.” —Nigel Cliff, The New York Times
• “[A] magnificent, powerful and absorbing book [...] beautifully done; a masterpiece even [...] French writes with the elegance you would expect from a distinguished foreign correspondent, and with the passion of someone deeply committed to providing a corrective.” —Peter Frankopan, The Observer