UPDATE: The Christopher “Biggie” Wallace Courts officially opened at the Crispus Attucks Playground in Clinton Hill today.
Editor's Note: This post was originally published on July 20, 2017 and has been updated with the most recent information.
Brooklyn continues to honor the late, legendary Notorious B.I.G, this time by naming a basketball court at the Crispus Attucks Playground in Clinton Hill after him. A renaming ceremony is scheduled to take place next month, days before an annual basketball tournament will be held in the rapper’s honor, reports the New York Daily News.
City Council member Robert Cornegy has been pushing to rename the court for Biggie for several years now, and told the Daily News that “this honor is very personal to me.” Some community members had pushed back against it, citing his “objectionable” lyrics, according to DNAInfo, but Cornegy prevailed, and the change was recently approved by the city.
Naming a basketball court after Biggie is one of the many ways in which the neighborhood has paid homage to the rapper. A two-story “King of NY” mural continues to adorn a building on the corner of Bedford Avenue and Quincy Street, despite a recent skirmish with the building’s landlord. And the Hip Hop Hall of Fame Museum is also seeking to raise $35,000 to create the Biggie Memorial Project which would fund a six-foot tall bronze sculpture at Clinton Hill’s Putnam Triangle.
And there’s precedent for this, too: In 2015, the city renamed another basketball court in Brooklyn Heights for Adam Yauch, one of the founding members of the Beastie Boys, who passed away in 2012.