There’s a small house at 2300 Jackson Street in Gary, Indiana, and it might be the most productive little home in the history of pop music. That’s where the Jackson family lived, and where the Jackson 5 were born.
Joe and Katherine Jackson married in November 1949. Joe had work at a steel mill, a crane operator at Inland Steel, and in early 1950 the young couple bought the house on Jackson Street for about $8,500. It was a two-bedroom place, not much more than a few small rooms, and that is where they raised their enormous family.
And it really was enormous. Nine kids grew up in that house. The boys were stacked in bunk beds in one bedroom, Joe and Katherine took the other, and the girls slept out in the living room. There was no space to spare, no privacy, nothing extra. Just a lot of people and, as it turned out, an unbelievable amount of talent packed under one small roof.
2016 Tour of Michael Jackson Childhood Home (Gary, IN)
That living room is where it started. Joe drilled the boys on their singing and dancing right there at home, and the group that would become the Jackson 5 took shape in those cramped rooms before they ever saw a real stage. For a family that had almost nothing, the one thing they had in abundance was music.
The whole thing moved west in 1969, after the Jackson 5 signed with Motown and the family relocated to the Los Angeles area to chase it properly. The little house in Gary had done its job.
Jackson Family Tours Indiana Home
These days the address is a landmark, with a marker out front and fans who make the trip just to stand where it all began. It’s a strange and kind of wonderful thing, that a two-bedroom house in a steel town produced a family that would go on to sell hundreds of millions of records.