Dizzy Gillespie helped make Minton’s Playhouse famous.

Minton’s in Harlem was where jazz musicians, from out-of-towners to locals performing in nearby big band theaters in Harlem, sought refuge during late-night jam sessions and a new genre, bebop, was born. Gillespie, together with Charlie Parker, is largely considered a pioneer of the rebellious jazz style that diverged from mainstream swing jazz’s emphasis on orchestrated productions and collective harmony. Instead, it ushered in an era of artistic experimentation that better reflected the realities of Black urban life and the talents of Black musicians.

“Jam sessions, such as those wonderfully exciting ones held at Minton’s Playhouse, were seedbeds for our new, modern style of music,” Gillespie wrote in his autobiography, “To Be or Not to Bop.”

But there was another gathering spot for Gillespie and his peers: the three-story Colonial Revival-style building in Corona, Queens, that he bought in 1953.

Jazz clubs were in Harlem. But jazz musicians lived on the tree-lined streets of Queens. While white musicians skedaddled to the suburbs, Black jazz virtuosos sought solace in the neighborhoods where their racial identity was welcomed — ultimately congregating into two enclaves in the borough. The first was in the southeast by Addisleigh Park where the composer Clarence Williams and his wife moved in the 1930s, with Count Basie, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington’s son, Mercer Ellington, and James Brown eventually following suit. The second was in Corona, where Louis Armstrong lived until his death, and a place that Gillespie, fellow trumpeter Clark Terry, and Ella Fitzgerald once called home.

Queens had the charm of the South, conveniences of the northern lifestyle and was close enough to the teeming jazz scene of Harlem without being ensnared. The borough didn’t generate a fresh jazz genre like Harlem. But the borough was an incubator where music got worked out, imagined and revised, as Black musicians were grappling with the commercialization of their craft.