Aretha Franklin was born at 406 Lucy Avenue in South Memphis on March 25, 1942, in a small frame house built around 1930. Her father, C.L. Franklin, was pastor of New Salem Baptist Church, and her mother, Barbara Siggers Franklin, was a singer. The family left when she was two, for Buffalo in 1944 and then Detroit, where her father's New Bethel church made her name. She was identified far more with Detroit than with the city of her birth. The house had a harder history after the family left. A later owner, Vera House, raised twelve children in it. It was declared a public nuisance in 2012, and a fire had badly damaged the back half by 2016, when a court ordered it demolished. Volunteers from Memphis Heritage boarded it up in what they called guerrilla preservation, and it passed to a court-appointed receiver. In 2018 the receiver said the biggest obstacle was less the estimated $150,000 than permission from the family to use her name. The city placed a marker in the yard in 2017. When she died on August 16, 2018, people gathered on Lucy Avenue and wrote messages on the plywood. In July 2024 the house was sold on the Shelby County Courthouse steps to Anasa Troutman, a Memphis preservationist who bought it personally and said she wanted to keep it on Lucy Avenue. It is private property on a residential street.
Getting there
35.1142, -90.0488
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