At once a biography, an urban history, and a cultural reckoning, Howard W. French's The Jungles reveals how a neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper West Side fostered numerous pathbreaking Black artists, among them Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917–1982).

The story opens in Cuba in 1898, where we watch as Teddy Roosevelt's forces triumph on San Juan Hill, with close to one-fifth of the overall invading force consisting of Black soldiers whose valor went largely unrecognized. After returning to the US, these veterans eventually settled in a Manhattan neighborhood that would take the battle's name. San Juan Hill became a lively, artistic Black community that inspired some of the twentieth century's greatest creative triumphs.

As Robert Moses began tearing down the neighborhood under the guise of "urban renewal," Monk became its most famous holdout, staying put in his cramped apartment at 243 West 63rd Street, his upright piano protruding from his bedroom into the kitchen as he continued to make his iconic music. By the late 1950s, Monk's genius had finally been recognized, but the erasure already felt irreversible, extending even to the musical West Side Story, which reimagined the neighborhood's streets as Latino gang territory, whitewashing the predominantly Black and Caribbean community that had actually lived there.

A compelling history from one of our finest American historians, The Jungles emerges as a new way of telling the history of music, of New York, and of America. The cradle of jazz was not only in New Orleans but also in San Juan Hill, and French's magnificent re-creation of that world restores to American cultural memory what erasure nearly stole for good.