52nd Street — Bebop's Birthplace, New York

West 52nd Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenues was the centre of the American jazz world from the late 1930s through the late 1940s — the street so packed with clubs it was known simply as 'Swing Street' or 'The Street.' The Famous Door, the Three Deuces, the Onyx Club, the Downbeat Club, and Kelly's Stable all operated within a few hundred feet of each other, and on any given night Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, or Miles Davis might be playing. It was here that bebop — the radical, fast, harmonically complex revolution in jazz — was invented in real time.

Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie's residencies at the Three Deuces in the mid-1940s were the crucible of bebop. Young Miles Davis came from Alton, Illinois to New York in 1944 specifically to find Parker and was soon sitting in on these 52nd Street sessions. Thelonious Monk, who lived just north of the area in Harlem, was a regular presence. The informal, competitive atmosphere of the clubs — where musicians would cut each other in extended improvised battles — created some of the most consequential music of the 20th century.

The original clubs are all long gone, replaced by office towers in the postwar redevelopment of Midtown. A plaque near the corner of 52nd Street and Seventh Avenue commemorates the street's jazz history. The block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues retains some of its original scale, and the area is worth visiting for any jazz history devotee.