Explore Eminem’s beloved teenage home after blaze (photos)

Eminem loved his teenage Detroit home so much that he took a model of it with him on tour.

The nondescript bungalow at 19946 Dresden is where he tapped into his lyrical talents and began to get noticed as a legitimate white hip hop artist.

For most of his childhood, Marshall Mathers lived in the predominately white suburbs of Warren and Eastpointe and was called a “wigger” because he emulated the black rappers he had admired. At one point, the young teenager even wore a plastic kitchen wall clock on a fake gold chain.

Although his mom continued to send him to Lincoln High in Warren, Eminem gravitated toward black clubs and hangouts. While skipping school and handing out flyers at Osborn High in Detroit, Eminem met a young rapper named Proof. They’d become best friends before Proof’s untimely death in 2006.  

“He wanted to be part of the landscape, part of the environment. I think it was just him assimilating,” his manager Paul Rosenberg told the Los Angeles Times.

Eminem built a reputation as a gifted rhymer at open-mike contests and small clubs. His mom said her son, Marshall Mathers, spent countless hours in his second-floor bedroom accumulating piles of notebooks filled with lyrics.

“Even though we’d moved a lot, he always said the house on Dresden was his childhood home,” his mom, Debbie Nelson, wrote in her memoir, “My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem.”

But life at home was far from easy. He and his mom were at each other’s throats. His relationship with future wife Kim Scott was often turbulent. And he dropped out of high school in 1989.

The 41-year-old rapper paid homage to the home by featuring it on two album covers, “The Marshall Mathers LP” and “The Marshall Mathers LP 2,” which was released last week.

Two days after “The Marshall Mathers LP 2” was released, someone intentionally set fire to the house. The blaze started in his second-floor bedroom.

Perhaps fittingly, Eminem wrote on Instagram last week that he visited his home “for the last time.”

In the mid-1990s, Eminem’s mom decided it was time to move after a neighbor’s house was firebombed.

“I couldn’t sell the house,” Nelson wrote. “The area was going downhill.”

Nelson eventually rented out the house, which has changed owners more than a dozen times since.

Most recently the 767-square-foot bungalow was selling for $32,885.

Most of the houses on his block are either burned out or falling apart.

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Steve Neavling

Steve Neavling lives and works in Detroit as an investigative journalist. His stories have uncovered corruption, led to arrests and reforms and prompted FBI investigations.

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