📍74 Fairfield Street, Springfield, MA 01108, USA
1906 – 1925“I was Ted Geisel, and I grew up in this house on Fairfield Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, with my parents and my older sister, Marnie. My grandfather and father ran the family brewery, and Clydesdale horses clattered over the cobblestones pulling barrels of beer. My mother, Henrietta, had worked in her family's bakery as a girl, and at bedtime she chanted rhymes and the patter of the bakery shop to us, the rhythms of which stayed in my head for life. My middle name, Seuss, was her maiden name. My father was also on the city's park board, and when Prohibition closed the brewery, he became superintendent of Springfield's parks, including the zoo in Forest Park. I spent hours there with him and with my sketchbook, drawing the animals and giving them odd shapes and expressions of my own. Our German family faced suspicion during the First World War, when boys called me names in the street, and I learned how it felt to be an outsider. At Classical High School I drew cartoons and wrote for the school paper. I left in 1921 for Dartmouth College and later worked as a cartoonist and advertising illustrator. My first children's book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, was named after a street near home and inspired by the rhythm of a ship's engine. Springfield appears all over my books, in its streets, its zoo animals and its civic grandeur. Today the city's Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden and the Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum stand near the zoo where my father worked and I first drew strange creatures.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today