Did Jay-Z travel back to the 1930s to do research for his "Great Gatsby" soundtrack?

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library posed the question on its blog and Facebook page this week, after curators noticed that a 1939 photo of a man in Harlem bore an uncanny resemblance to the 43-year-old rapper and mogul.


The black-and-white photograph, snapped by a man named Sid Grossman, shows one man leaning on a railing and staring directly at the camera.

“I was immediately struck by the similarity to Jay-Z and actually laughed out loud," said Sylviane A. Diouf, Schomburg’s Curator of Digital Collections. "I still hope somebody will tell us who that young man really was.”

[Gothamist]