Crews demolished Eminem’s beloved teenage home in Detroit

Eminem’s beloved teenage home in Detroit, which he featured on two album covers, was demolished today after someone intentionally set the rapper’s second-floor bedroom on fire earlier this month.

The nondescript bungalow at 19946 Dresden is where Eminem began to get noticed as a legitimate white hip hop artist.

The Michigan Land Bank, which owns the property, demolished the fire-gutted house because it was considered “structurally unsafe.”

The 41-year-old rapper paid homage to the house by featuring it on two album covers, “The Marshall Mathers LP” and “The Marshall Mathers LP 2,”, which was released two days before the Nov. 7 fire.

While living at his Dresden home, Marshall Mathers built a reputation as a gifted rhymer at open-mike contests and small clubs. His mom said her son 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.”

Although she continued to send Eminem 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.

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.

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.

Before the fire, the 767-square-foot bungalow was selling for $32,885.

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

  Arson, detroit, Eminem, fire, House, steve

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.

• 
• 
• 
• 
•