Thelonious Monk Childhood Home — West 63rd Street, New York

Thelonious Monk grew up at 243 West 63rd Street in the San Juan Hill neighbourhood of Manhattan — a Black community that was demolished to build Lincoln Center in the 1950s and 1960s, displacing thousands of residents including many musicians. Monk arrived in New York from Rocky Mount, North Carolina as a child and absorbed the Harlem stride piano tradition before developing his own idiosyncratic approach: angular melodies, dissonant harmonies, unusual rhythmic hesitations and silences that sounded like mistakes to untrained ears but were in fact products of extraordinary intentionality.

Monk was a central figure in the bebop revolution at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem in the early 1940s, alongside Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Kenny Clarke. His compositions — 'Round Midnight,' 'Straight, No Chaser,' 'Blue Monk,' 'Well, You Needn't,' 'Epistrophy' — are among the most recorded in jazz history, and his piano playing, which influenced everyone who followed despite being unlike anyone who came before, remains one of music's great singular voices. He was famously reclusive and eccentric; his personal life was protected by his wife Nellie with fierce loyalty.

The San Juan Hill neighbourhood where Monk grew up no longer exists — Lincoln Center's construction erased it. A plaque at Lincoln Center acknowledges the community that was displaced. Monk's later home at 243 West 63rd Street is within Lincoln Center's footprint. He lived in later years on West 132nd Street in Harlem, and he died in Weehawken, New Jersey, in 1982.