In the early 1930s, Thelonious Monk's family moved from NC into a small apartment in Manhattan, the city where he spent most of the rest of his life. Largely self-taught, he began musical activities by age six, and at age ten he started playing an old piano that belonged to his grandparents. As a teenager in Harlem during the Depression, he developed a highly personalized style of skewed melodies and oblique harmonic progressions. His emergence as a jazz pianist came through his association with Minton's Playhouse at the Hotel Cecil on 118th Street in Harlem, where in 1940 Henry Minton turned a run-down dining room into a jazz club featuring avant-garde improvisational jam sessions. Monk went on to shake up the jazz world with his angular compositions and freewheeling style.