Gilda Radner’s Childhood Home

Before she was the heart of the original Saturday Night Live, Gilda Radner was a Detroit girl on Wildemere Street. She grew up in this stately University District home — the daughter of Herman Radner, who ran Detroit’s Seville Hotel, where touring performers and nightclub acts stayed, so showbiz was practically in the air at the dinner table. She attended the University Liggett School and the University of Michigan before finding her way to Toronto’s Second City and, in 1975, the call that made history: Lorne Michaels hired her as the very first cast member of SNL.

As Emily Litella and Roseanne Roseannadanna, she became the most beloved of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players — Rolling Stone later ranked her the ninth most important SNL cast member ever, “the prototype for the brainy city girl with a bundle of neuroses.” She died far too young, of ovarian cancer, in 1989, at just 42, and the cancer-support community Gilda’s Club carries her name to this day. But it started right here, in a comfortable Detroit neighborhood, with a kid whose father took her downtown to see the Broadway road shows.