I remember covering Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra at Brooklyn College soon after its creation, sometime around 2001, before it began a five-year affiliation with Jazz at Lincoln Center (2002-2007). Few would’ve imagined that O’Farrill’s vision, which grew into the non-profit Afro-Latin Jazz Alliance and later Belongó, would one day have its own world-class theater and community space, the Casa Belongó Music and Arts Center, to be housed in a new building complex called Timbale Terrace, on 118th Street and Park Avenue in East Harlem.
The project broke ground on Wednesday, February 18, with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other officials in attendance, donning hard hats and shovels. A ribbon-cutting is slated to follow in 2027.
O’Farrill and the Casa Belongó Players, including the pianist’s sons Adam and Zack, premiered an ambitious new composition for the event, which Mamdani effusively praised as “the first mayoral mambo” before delivering salient remarks on this active construction site all around us, one that will transform the arts landscape not only of Harlem but the city as a whole.
To call the process laborious — approval and financing efforts began many years before Mamdani took office — is to understate it, as the mayor, city comptroller Mark Levine and other speakers made clear. O’Farrill had to fight back tears more than once, so sweet and long-awaited was this victory.
Timbale Terrace will include not only a state-of-the-art concert venue but also space for rehearsal and classroom music instruction, cultural programming and events — and perhaps most ambitiously of all from Mayor Mamdani’s standpoint, 341 affordable housing units, 97 of them administered by Lantern Community Services as supportive housing with wraparound services for tenants formerly on the street or in shelters. Casa Belongó is giving back to the community in its very inception.
Comptroller Levine spoke of how Timbale Terrace captures in microcosm all the political and economic struggles plaguing New York City housing overall. There were once tenements here; they were torn down ostensibly to make way for new homes, which never materialized. So the lot sat vacant, not just for a while, but for decades, until it became a parking lot for the NYPD’s 25th Precinct (in the final deal, the cops retain 75 parking spaces).
What was left to rot all those years was in fact prime real estate, mere blocks from mass transit, as Levine pointed out. Nearly everyone on the dais, certainly Mamdani, spoke of replicating Timbale Terrace–like initiatives throughout the city. “Community planning at its best,” he called it, as well as “proof that the arts and housing can work together in combination.”
“Progress is not accidental,” added Asahi Pompey, global head of corporate engagement and Chair of the Urban Investment Group at Goldman Sachs, who spoke of the mammoth work and sheer will involved in pushing through a project “with a conscience,” one with clear, wide-ranging social and economic benefits.
Arturo O’Farrill did not speak; he didn’t have to. Like him, we in the jazz community felt it in our gut. We know what it means to gain an institution of this kind, a community hub in which the Belongó organization can reside entirely rent-free for 60 years. It is the ultimate tribute to O’Farrill’s pioneering late father Chico and all the musical forebears, not to mention all the culture and history of Harlem, which still endures. JT