Jack White’s Childhood Home

This modest house at 1203 Ferdinand is where the entire White Stripes aesthetic was born. John Anthony Gillis — the future Jack White — grew up here as the youngest of ten kids in a Polish-and-Scottish Catholic family in Mexicantown, Southwest Detroit. You’ve arguably already seen it: the house turns up in the band’s early album art and videos. He nearly became a priest (he’d been accepted to a seminary) but changed his mind partly because he’d just gotten an amplifier he didn’t want to leave behind.

At fifteen he apprenticed with a neighborhood upholsterer named Brian Muldoon, who turned him on to punk — and here’s the detail every fan loves: Jack was the third upholsterer to work the 1200 block of Ferdinand, which is exactly where “Third Man” comes from, the name that now brands his whole empire. He bought the house from his parents in 1997 and recorded the White Stripes’ second album, De Stijl, right here in a home studio. Scrappy Detroit upholsterer’s kid to global rock icon, and it started on this block. Pair it with his Indian Village mansion for the full arc.