📍South Shore, Chicago, IL, USA
1980 – 2002“Kanye Omari West was born in Atlanta in June 1977, and when he was three, after his parents divorced, his mother, Donda, brought him to Chicago. In the early 1980s she bought a 1,600-square-foot house at 7815 South South Shore Drive, in South Shore, a middle-class Black neighbourhood on the South Side by Lake Michigan, and they lived there while she taught English at Chicago State University, where she later chaired the English department. She was his greatest supporter and influence. Kanye was creative from the start: he drew, wrote poetry and painted, and at five he was writing poems. In 1987, when he was ten, he lived for a year with his mother in Nanjing, China, where she taught at Nanjing University; he was the only foreigner in his class and quickly picked up Chinese, and the local children remembered him breakdancing. Back in Chicago, he went to Polaris High School in suburban Oak Lawn. He began rapping in third grade and making beats in seventh, and at fifteen he got his first sampler and met the producer No I.D., who became his mentor and taught him how to sample and program beats. He went to art school and Chicago State, but left to pursue music, producing hits for Jay-Z and Roc-A-Fella Records. His debut album, The College Dropout, in 2004, won Grammy Awards and made him one of the most influential artists of his generation. He later bought back his childhood home in South Shore, where his mother had raised him.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today