📍Highland Park, Pittsburgh, PA 15206, USA
1912 – 1938“I was born in August 1912 in a rented house on the corner of Portland and Bryant streets in Highland Park, a leafy, hilly neighbourhood in the east of Pittsburgh, the third of five children of James Kelly, a travelling phonograph salesman, and Harriet, who loved the theatre. Ours was a lively, Irish Catholic household, and my mother was determined that her children would have culture: she sent us to dancing lessons and entered all five of us in amateur nights as the Five Kellys. My brother Fred and I hated the lessons at first. The neighbourhood boys called us sissies, and we got into fistfights over it. I was mad about sport and dreamed of playing shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and I played ice hockey, football and baseball in the streets and parks. I didn't dance again until I was fifteen, when I realised that dancing was a good way to impress the girls, and that it could be as athletic as any sport. I graduated from Peabody High School in 1929, just as the Depression began. To earn money we performed in clubs and talent contests, and my family opened a dance studio, which became the Gene Kelly Studio of the Dance, in Pittsburgh and Johnstown. I taught there while I studied economics at the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1933. In 1938 I left for Broadway, leaving Fred and my sister Louise to run the studios. Pal Joey made me a Broadway star, and in Hollywood I danced in On the Town, An American in Paris and Singin' in the Rain, bringing the athletic style of a Pittsburgh street kid to film.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today