Where did Orson Welles grow up and live?

📍463 Park Avenue, Kenosha, WI 53140

1915 – 1931

“I was born on the 6th of May 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the son of Richard Welles, an inventor, and Beatrice Ives, a concert pianist. My childhood was extraordinary and unstable: my parents separated when I was six and both died before I was sixteen. My father took me travelling through Asia and my mother gave me music and painting and theatre. I arrived in Ireland at sixteen claiming to be a famous Broadway actor, bluffed my way into the Gate Theatre in Dublin, and was performing professionally within months. By twenty-five I had made Citizen Kane. Kenosha was the beginning — the Midwest stability I was given and immediately fled.”

👍 LovedThe extraordinary gifts my parents gave me — my mother's arts, my father's adventurousness. The lack of conventional constraints that allowed an unusual intelligence to develop unusually.

👎 DislikedThe losses — both parents dead before I was sixteen. The instability that gifted but absent parents produce. The precocity that made conventional education impossible.

Map showing where Orson Welles lived — 463 Park Avenue, Kenosha, WI 53140

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Orson Welles's home at 463 Park Avenue, Kenosha, WI 53140

📍 Street view today

Sources: Thomson, D. Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (1996), Knopf; Brady, F. Citizen Welles (1989), Scribner