📍Mount Vernon, New York, USA
1954 – 1968“Denzel Washington grew up in Mount Vernon, New York, just north of the Bronx, the middle of three children. His father, the Reverend Denzel Washington Sr., was a Pentecostal minister who also worked for the city's water department and at a local department store; his mother, Lennis, owned and ran a beauty parlour. Home was strict and church-centred, and he has often said that his parents' work ethic, and his mother's prayers, were the foundation of his life. On the day he turned six, he joined the Mount Vernon Boys Club, and it became his second home. There, he has said, he learned discipline and found mentors who believed in him; it also gave him his first taste of performing, in a club talent show. At eleven he started sweeping floors in his mother's beauty shop and later worked in a barber shop, where he listened to the men's stories, arguments and jokes and absorbed the way people speak. Mount Vernon was a working, mixed town, and his friends came from every background. When he was fourteen his parents divorced, and his mother sent him to Oakland Military Academy, a private boarding school upstate. He has said it changed his life, keeping him away from the trouble some of his friends fell into. He went on to Fordham University, discovered acting and became one of the great actors of his generation. He never forgot the Boys Club: for many years he has been a national spokesman for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, telling young people that the club in Mount Vernon helped save him.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today