📍Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects, Detroit, MI 48201, USA
1958 – 1964“Diana Ross spent her early childhood on Belmont Street in Detroit's North End, and on her fourteenth birthday in 1958 her family moved into the Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects, among the first public housing built for Black families in the United States. It was home to thousands of working families, and its yards, stairwells and community centre were full of children, music and ambition. Her parents expected their children to work hard and carry themselves well. She was a stylish, determined teenager who wanted to be a fashion designer. At Cass Technical High School downtown she studied design, millinery, pattern-making and dressmaking, and she later recalled a job at Hudson's department store, where biographers say she was the first Black employee allowed to work outside the kitchen. Close by in the projects lived Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson, and with them she joined a girl group, the Primettes, which practised in the neighbourhood and sang wherever they could. The young women kept knocking on Motown's door on West Grand Boulevard until Berry Gordy signed them in 1961, and they became the Supremes. In the early years they sewed their own gowns, and Diana's eye for style, learned at Cass Tech, became part of the group's elegance. Between 1964 and 1969 the Supremes had twelve number-one hits, and the Brewster-Douglass projects became known as the place that produced them. Diana has often spoken of Detroit with pride, and of the discipline and dreams she learned in those crowded towers.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today