Prince's childhood home sits abandoned in north Minneapolis. What will happen to it next?
The yellow childhood home of the Purple One is abandoned and in need of some TLC, despite the City of Minneapolis recently granting it landmark status. So what will happen to it next? WCCO went there to find out.
It may look modest. But the yellow house on the corner of Upton and Eighth avenues in north Minneapolis is where greatness took shape.
"If they only knew, they wouldn't walk by here and just walk past it, they'd go, 'Wow,'" said Charles Smith. "It totally came together here."
And Smith had a front row seat.
"It was like we were brothers," said Smith, who was Prince's second cousin. He says their grandmothers were sisters. He lived just up the block when they were little kids.
"I'd come down here every day, we'd sit down by the piano, I'd sit right next to him on the bench and I'd start doing some beats and stuff and Prince would be doing everything he could think of on the piano and we started structuring songs and stuff," said Smith.
He would come over and hang in Prince's basement bedroom as the future star riffed on his dad's piano, copying tunes from their favorite shows and superheroes.
'"Sanford and Son,' the theme, if you know how difficult, Quincy Jones was producer of that," said Smith. "We'd play the 'Batman' theme."
"Once we learned that we could pick them up off the television and off the radio and then on the records, it was a wrap," said Smith.
Watching musical genius gel before they were even teenagers.
"He just started playing this guitar like he had been playing it 100 years," said Smith. "He started playing Santana, like Carlos Santana, in this basement."
"I'm just telling you he had to be ordained to play the guitar," Smith added. "What I know from seeing it, it's unearthly."
"The Nelson family bought this house in March of 1965," said Kristen Zschomler, a local Prince expert and co-founder of SoundAround music tours. "It was just before his 7th birthday when they moved in."
Zschomler says the legend lived here until he was 12.
"It was here where, by the age of 8, he mastered the piano," said Zschomler.
She says there were challenging milestones in the house, too. Prince's parents divorced and his dad moved out, leaving him with unlimited access to his piano. She says the star later recalled biking to the record shop, picking up albums, writing out the lyrics, then figuring out the chords on the piano right here in this house.
"But for this place, he wouldn't have become the artist that he was," said Zschomler.
Prince was on a musical mission and Smith says the neighborhood in north Minneapolis played backup.
"As a matter of fact, this block blows me away because there was a couple ladies that had organs in their house. Ms. Harper, I'll never forget her. She was a piano teacher, so Prince goes in there, blows her away. She says, 'You guys can come to my house any time to play,'" said Smith. "Across the street over here in this white house over here, I went and borrowed his drum set, brought it over here to Prince, now Prince got a drummer."
Zschomler's research on this house was instrumental in the city's recent decision to make it a Minneapolis City Landmark.
"He was such an important artist in my life," said Zschomler. "I was looking for some way that I could do something to help with his legacy."
"I think that's fly," said Smith. "I'm inspired. That's pretty good for where we come from."
"I think a place like this, a place that helped make Prince, is just so critical to preserve," said Zschomler.
Though the question now is what happens next?
"My understanding is that the house is currently abandoned," said Zschomler.
"Something should be done," said Smith. "I would love if when people ride by, they would know that it was Prince's house."
It's a place Smith remembers was styled impeccably by Prince's mother
"She had it laid out like Prince," said Smith. "And she had beautiful flowers all around this. She would go, 'What has happened to my house?'"
"There was a similar struggle for what to do with Aretha Franklin's childhood home in Memphis," said Zschomler. "Some sort of community music program, I think, would just be so fitting."
"I like the music lesson thing," said Smith. "Genius can come up out of anywhere."
For now, the place where Prince realized his potential sits with possibilities of its own.
"I bet you people would probably come by and probably take care of it better, too, if they knew this was Prince's spot," said Smith. "I can't even believe it sometimes. What a cool ride."