NYT ::: Museo del Hip Hop - cuándo?

Grandmaster Caz en 1981

A Museum Quest Spins On and On

IN the lobby of a budget hotel in Midtown Manhattan, Craig Wilson began his staff meeting, oblivious to guests strolling past. The location, he conceded, was far from ideal; the same could be said for the prospects of his venture.

Mr. Wilson is the president of the National Museum of Hip-Hop, a title made slightly confusing by the unavoidable fact that there is no such museum. He has been trying to create one for five years and has obtained a charter from the New York State Board of Regents and 501(c)3 tax-exempt status. But despite an ambitious concept, a polished Web site and a goal of raising $50 million, his organization has a bank account with only about $6,000.

“Hip-hop as a culture is extremely powerful, but I think there is a stereotype out there that none of us can work together,” he said. “I am hoping to turn that image around and show people how powerful we actually are.”

Mr. Wilson is not the first to try to create such a museum, and some in the hip-hop community have voiced concern that the genre’s pioneers would not fairly benefit from the project. At an event in April, the rapper KRS-One told reporters that Mr. Wilson needed to ensure that some of the museum’s revenue would go toward helping some of hip-hop’s originators, who did not enjoy the commercial success of some of those who came later.

But KRS-One, who is also known as Kris Parker, acknowledged Mr. Wilson’s efforts, comparing him to Perseus, the hero of Greek mythology.

“He is like Perseus: against all odds, but still represents the best chance,” KRS-One said in an interview last month.

Mr. Wilson was born in 1975, two years after and a mile or so away from the accepted birth of hip-hop, in a community room inside 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx.

“I’ve been rhyming since I could talk, graffiti writing since I first learned to hold a pencil, b-boying since I could walk, and making beats since the first desk I sat at in school,” he said.

He went to Rutgers University, where he received a bachelor’s degree from the business school, and, after a stint as a financial adviser at Morgan Stanley, started his own managing, marketing and consulting firm in 2002.

In 2005, a group of investors seeking to create a hip-hop museum asked if Mr. Wilson could help. He ended up taking control of the project, and within a year he dissolved his own company and turned his full attention to the museum. “I realized all the failures before us had a common denominator: there was no perseverance involved, no one was willing to just give up everything and concentrate on making this happen,” he said. “So I did.”

He originally wanted to place the museum in the Bronx. He said that in 2007, he was promised by Adolfo Carrión Jr., then the Bronx borough president, that he could use a contaminated parcel of city land near Yankee Stadium. When that property proved too costly to rehabilitate, Mr. Wilson expanded his search to Harlem.

The difficulties in finding a site and financing led him to scale back his initial vision; instead of a 100,000-square-foot museum, he is now planning for a building roughly half that size, hoping that it will later grow.

He works on the project out of a small room that also serves as his home in a two-family house he owns in Fort Lee, N.J. Rent from the rest of the building is his only income, he said. His relatives “think I’m crazy,” Mr. Wilson said. “They know I’m educated and I’ve had jobs, so it just doesn’t make sense to them.”

“The only reason I can come up with is that I truly believe if I don’t, no one else will,” he said.

That said, Mr. Wilson is not the first to try.

In 1996, J. T. Thompson, a community activist in Los Angeles, created the “Hip Hop Hall of Fame Awards Show,” hoping to echo the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s model of using a series of shows to raise money for a museum. The awards show was carried on BET in 1996, and Mr. Thompson secured a deal with Showtime to make it an annual telecast. But with the murders of Tupac Shakur that September and Biggie Smalls six months later, the show was scrapped. Mr. Thompson has continued to work to resurrect the program and to build a hall of fame.

In 1999, Ernest Davis, then the mayor of Mount Vernon, N.Y., proposed turning an abandoned firehouse into a hip-hop museum. Despite a $500,000 grant and positive feedback in the print media, plans stalled.

Larry B. Seabrook, a City Council member from the Bronx, tried six years later, securing $1.5 million from the city for seed money to revitalize a building in the northeast Bronx. But after Mr. Seabrook’s indictment in February on federal fraud and money laundering charges, support for the project vanished.

Each attempt faced similar problems: a lack of money and an inability to get some of hip-hop’s founders to coalesce behind it.

“Everyone comes to us, wants to put us on display to help them get funding, and nothing ever comes of it,” said Curtis Brown, who, as Grandmaster Caz, was an original member of the hip-hop group Cold Crush Brothers. Mr. Brown and other hip-hop founders say they should be given positions in any organization that seeks to profit from their history. And while they insist that respect is as much a motivation as money, they are cognizant of a past in which, for example, Mr. Brown was not compensated when his lyrics were used in the 1979 Sugarhill Gang song “Rapper’s Delight.”

“It’s not about money, but it is about money,” KRS-One said.

John Ambrose, the vice president of Mr. Wilson’s museum organization, said that once the facility opened, part of the revenue would be dedicated to a foundation to support early hip-hop artists and help them reinvent or re-energize their careers.

This month, the National Museum of Hip-Hop will begin its first major fund-raising campaign, “Donate a Dollah,” trying to get legions of fans to give $1 each.

“The hip-hop posse is huge, and not only in the U.S.,” said Mr. Wilson, whose board of governors includes Benjamin Chavis, a former executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “If we got a dollar from just hip-hop fans in New York City alone, we would be fully funded.”