Stevie Wonder’s Childhood Home

Before the 25 Grammys and the Bel Air palace, there was a modest two-story house on Greenlawn where a kid the world would call “Little Stevie” lived with his parents and four siblings — and, by all accounts, kept the household lively by practicing harmonica and piano down in the basement. Neighbors remembered a cheerful boy they’d spot in a baby-blue tuxedo, getting ready to head out to a Motown concert. He lived here through the 1960s, before fame carried him to the West Coast. The contrast is the whole story: this unassuming Detroit home, and the 19,000-square-foot, fifteen-bathroom Bel Air mansion he’d buy decades later. Everything started in that basement. (His family bounced through a few Detroit addresses first — including one near Fenkell where, as legend has it, young Stevie got booted from the church choir for wailing on bongos out on the front steps.)