Florence Ballard’s Last Home

This modest house on Shaftsbury is where one of Motown’s saddest stories came to rest. Florence Ballard founded the group that became the Supremes — and even chose its name — singing beside Diana Ross and Mary Wilson through the hits that made the label a global force. Pushed out in 1967, she endured foreclosure and hard, dwindling years; by the mid-1970s she was living here, far from the spotlight she’d helped create. She died in 1976, at just 32.

There’s nothing grand about the house, and that’s rather the point — a quiet, sobering counterweight to the glamour elsewhere on the Motown map, and a world away from the girlhood she shared with bandmate Diana Ross. She’s buried at Detroit Memorial Park. On our list, with care.