Many Harlemites don’t know that Bob Dylan lived in Harlem, on Strivers Row, for many years.

Bob Dylan owned the home for 14 years before selling it to its current owners in 2000. They purchased the house from the folk icon for just $560,000. The four-story townhouse at 265 West 139th Street

Richard Avedon took the (above) black and white photo of Bob Dylan on Nov. 4, 1963. The location is approximately 132nd Street and the Harlem River. The 22-year-old Bob Dylan is just south of the Metro-North Bridge between Manhattan and the Bronx, which crosses out of Manhattan at Park Avenue and 134th Street in East Harlem.

The black and white photo, of Dylan in jeans, a flannel shirt, and a battered guitar case, is often contrasted with Avedon’s next photo of Dylan, taken in 1965 along Central Park East, with Dylan wearing a fashionable long dark coat and tall leather boots and bearing a world-weary superstar’s look.

Click the following link to see the location from FDR Drive – showing the earlier photo’s location: http://bit.ly/2bQJkWd

Lung Block

For many of the reasons that remain today (and are evidenced in the COVID-19 death rates among Black Americans vs. white Americans) in the 1930’s tuberculosis and pneumonia killed nearly twice as many Black Harlem residents as white New Yorkers.

By 1934 one Harlem block was deemed “Lung Block” on account of the widespread infection rates in this part of Harlem. The block was located between 142 and 143rd Street, and 6th and 7th Avenues.