📍East Orange, NJ 07017, USA
1967 – 1985“I was born in Newark, and when I was a little girl my family moved to Dodd Street in East Orange, a leafy, mixed, middle-class neighbourhood that people sometimes called Doddtown. It was a busy house. My mother, Cissy, was a gospel and session singer who sang backing vocals for Aretha Franklin and Elvis Presley, my father, John, managed her career, and my cousins Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick were already stars. Music was not a dream in our family; it was the family business, and my mother was the strictest teacher I ever had. The centre of our world was New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, where my mother directed the music. I sang there from childhood, and at about twelve I sang my first solo in front of the congregation, leading the junior choir. I still remember how the room seemed to stop. My mother taught me breath, discipline and phrasing, and above all that a song should mean something to the people hearing it. On weekdays I went to Mount Saint Dominic Academy, a Catholic girls' school in Caldwell, where I made lifelong friends. As a teenager I sang backing vocals in my mother's nightclub act and in studios, and modelled for magazines, before Clive Davis signed me in 1983. From the start, people heard church in my voice, and they were right. However far I travelled, New Hope remained my home church and my mother's voice remained in my head. New Hope is where my family and community later gathered to celebrate my life, and in East Orange the school I attended as a girl now carries my name, the Whitney E. Houston Academy.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today