Aretha Franklin’s birth home at risk of demolition

Elvis Presley’s Graceland is the most famous musical home in the MidSouth, but it’s far from alone. Presley’s first home in Tupelo, Miss., has become a museum, while Presley’s first adult home, in East Memphis, hosts events. And blues pianist Memphis Slim’s house has been converted into a kind of musical community center.

But now, another famed musical abode, once thought a candidate for similar preservation, could soon be demolished.

A Shelby County Environmental Court order on Thursday put the deteriorating birth home of soul queen Aretha Franklin into a city receivership with an order to “abate nuisance through demolition.”

“Nobody wants to tear it down, but also it can’t stay like it’s been, without being secured or maintained, forever,” said Steve Barlow, a staff attorney for the city of Memphis and a leader of the non- profit Neighborhood Preservation Inc.

The small home is on a tucked- away residential street in South Memphis, surrounded by other boarded- up properties.

The front of the house is secured, but the left side is sag- ging, and a fire a few years ago led to a collapsed roof on an added back portion, which remained open to entry as of Saturday.

Franklin, the most celebrated woman in the history of American soul music, was born in the front of the house on March 25, 1942, and lived there for two years before her father, the Rev. C. L. Franklin, moved the family first to Buffalo and later to Detroit.

The listed owner and defendant on the court order is Vera L. House, who said she raised 12 children there but hasn’t lived in the house for years.

“I turned it over to the courts to try to find someone who would keep it standing, but they waited so long until the house is about to fall,” said House. “The front, where ( Aretha) was born, is still good.”

There has also been a complicating legal dispute between House and the property’s mortgage owner.

The house was first certified a public nuisance on Oct. 4, 2012, and has been subject to periodic checks since.

MARK WEBER, THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL Aretha Franklin’s birth home in Memphis, boarded up and in disrepair, is in jeopardy of being torn down.