On Our Radar 🏠 Private home · admire from the street

Ray Parker Jr.’s Childhood Home

Our Take

Who you gonna call? Turns out the answer grew up at 3780 Virginia Park. Born in Detroit in 1954, Ray Parker Jr. was a teenage guitar prodigy — backing Gladys Knight and playing for the Spinners before he was out of high school — who left for Los Angeles at nineteen and became one of the most in-demand session guitarists alive, recording with Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Barry White, and Tina Turner, and touring with the Rolling Stones. Then, in 1984, he wrote and sang a goofy little movie theme called “Ghostbusters” and became a household name forever. He’s refreshingly unbothered about being a one-hit wonder for it: “How could you hate having a winning lottery ticket?”

Honest heads-up: the house has fallen on very hard times in recent years — at one point it was a $1,000 Detroit Land Bank fixer-upper — so this is more a quiet pilgrimage than a postcard. Still: a Grammy-winning, Oscar-nominated career started on this block.