NYC Flat Bill Cap: Da Bronx

Two words that hit different when you know where they come from.

Nobody says the Bronx quite like the Bronx says it. Not Manhattan. Not Brooklyn. Not any other borough in the five that make up this city. The Bronx has its own cadence, its own energy, its own particular way of announcing itself that has been refined over generations of people who grew up in these streets and carry the borough in their voice the way other people carry it on a map. Da Bronx. Not the Bronx. Not Bronx, New York. Da Bronx. The article doing more work in two letters than most words do in ten.

It is a declaration. It always has been.

The Bronx is the only borough of New York City connected to the American mainland — the only one you can walk to from Westchester without crossing a bridge or a tunnel. It was named for Jonas Bronck, a Danish Swedish settler who established a farm here in 1639 and became the first European to settle in the area. People would say they were going to visit the Broncks the way you say you are going to visit anyone — and the name stuck long after the Broncks themselves were gone. The possessive dropped away over time but the "the" never did. It has always been the Bronx. It has always been Da Bronx.

What grew up in that borough over the next four centuries is one of the most extraordinary cultural stories in the history of any American neighborhood.

The Yankees built their house here in 1923 and won 27 World Series championships inside its walls. The Grand Concourse was constructed as the Champs-Élysées of New York — a grand boulevard lined with Art Deco masterpieces that housed generations of working-class families who were proud of every square foot of it. The New York Botanical Garden and the Bronx Zoo sit side by side as two of the greatest institutions of their kind in the world — both of them in Da Bronx, both of them there before most of the city's most celebrated landmarks were even planned.

And then in the late 1970s something happened in Da Bronx that changed the entire world.

In the community rooms and the park jams and the basement parties of the South Bronx a group of young people invented something from almost nothing — from turntables and vinyl records and the particular creative genius that only emerges when a community is pushed to its limits and refuses to accept those limits as final. Hip hop was born in Da Bronx. Not inspired by it. Not connected to it. Born there. DJ Kool Herc threw a back-to-school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue on August 11th, 1973, and extended the break beat of a record long enough to create something the world had never heard before. What followed changed music, changed fashion, changed language, changed culture on every continent on earth.

All of it from Da Bronx.

This borough has been underestimated, overlooked, written off, and counted out more times than anyone who grew up here has bothered to count. It has responded every single time the same way — by producing something extraordinary and letting the work speak for itself. The Yankees. The hip hop. The Grand Concourse. The botanical garden. The people.

Always the people.

Da Bronx does not ask for your recognition. It has never needed it. It has always known exactly what it is and exactly what it has given the world and it wears that knowledge the way this hat wears those two words — straight across the front, no apology, no explanation, no qualification required.

This hat is for everyone who says Da Bronx the right way and means every syllable of it.

Made for the locals. Inspired by the legends.

• 100% cotton twill

• Structured

• White embroidery

• Five panel

• High profile

• Green undervisor

• Sewn eyelets

• Snapback closure