"There is a historic landmark in the borough of Brooklyn, New York, that has been forgotten. In the early twentieth century, the neighborhood known as Williamsburg was home to a polyglot population: Italian and Polish immigrant families pushed out of overcrowded Manhattan; Irish families who'd been there a bit longer; and single men of various ethnicities attached to the nearby Navy Yard. To cater to the latter, in 1904 the Young Men's Christian Association opened a lodging house at 179 Marcy Avenue, near a stop on the BMT subway line and a few blocks in from the Williamsburg Bridge. And it was there at the Williamsburg YMCA, in a single room sometime in the mid-1940s, that the Delta blues was born."
In Search of the Blues
Marybeth Hamilton, 2008
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