After NYC mayor Bill de Blasio signed off on the tribute in August, the finished work is finally installed.
The ceremony to rename the corner of Linden Boulevard and 192th Street in Queens, New York Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor Way happened this afternoon in the late rapper’s St. Albans neighborhood.
Q-Tip, Jarobi White and other friends and family of Phife attended the event and unveiled the street sign. White expressed awe at the occasion: “People get murals and tributes to them all over the place, but to have a mural on the very block, the very street that we walked every day?”
“Rappers have been repping their locales since before hip-hop existed, but Phife had a way with random references to his corner of New York City,” FACT contributor Andrew Friedman wrote in March after Phife Dawg passed away form complications with diabetes.
“It never felt like the provincial blinders of a world limited by a lack of opportunity, or the bluster of a modern teen ready to throw down for his obscure block on the Southside of Chicago. It just seemed like Phife had never considered people might not know what Carvel was. That is, he sounded like a true New Yorker.”
See video from the unveiling below.
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