Other Notable New Yorkers From The Projects

With federal judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court, much has been made of her rise from the Bronxdale Houses public housing project in the South Bronx. The NY Times has map showing the housing projects where some other successful New Yorkers grew up—and an article speaking to some of them. Basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar grew up in the Dyckman Houses (back then, he was Lew Alcindor). His family moved to an apartment in Building 3 there in 1950, from a shared apartment in Harlem, "[It] was really considered a step up. We had two bedrooms — for us. We didn’t have to share the kitchen or the bathroom." Writer Richard Price lived in the Parkside Houses in the Bronx and incoming Xerox CEO Ursula Burns lived at the Baruch Houses on the Lower East Side ("There were lots of Jewish immigrants, fewer Hispanics and African-Americans but the common denominator and great equalizer was poverty"). And Whoopi Goldberg described life at the Elliott-Chelsea Houses, "People were from Latvia, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Africa., From everywhere. So you had to be able to say things like, ‘Hello, I’m so and so,’ and ‘May I use the bathroom?’ in every language."