📍226 St. James Place, Brooklyn, NY 11238, USA
1972 – 1994“I was born Christopher George Latore Wallace in Brooklyn in May 1972, and grew up in an apartment at 226 St. James Place, on a block of brownstones between Fulton Street and Gates Avenue in Clinton Hill, near the border with Bedford-Stuyvesant. My mother, Voletta Wallace, came from Jamaica; she was a preschool teacher who worked two jobs to raise me alone after my father left when I was two. She was strict and loving, and she gave me everything she could. I was a big kid, and they called me Big. I was a good student, especially at English, and I won awards for it, and I went to Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, then to George Westinghouse High School, where Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes went too. But Fulton Street was full of temptation, and at about twelve I began hustling on the corner, which broke my mother's heart. I was always rhyming, though, on the street, in the schoolyard, battling anyone who'd step up, and when I was seventeen, I left school for good. A local DJ, Mister Cee, heard a demo tape I made in a friend's basement, and it reached the editors of The Source magazine. In 1992 Sean Combs signed me to Bad Boy Records, and my album Ready to Die told the story of my life on St. James Place, with Juicy, about dreaming big as a kid in Brooklyn. In 2019, the city named my old block Christopher Notorious B.I.G. Wallace Way, so the kids of Clinton Hill can see that a boy from their block can become a legend.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today