Porch Notes
The Little House on West Grand Boulevard That Changed Music Forever
History and culture
One of the most important record labels in history started in a regular two-family house in Detroit, bought with an $800 loan from a family savings club.
In 1959, a former boxer and auto-line worker named Berry Gordy Jr. borrowed $800 from the Gordy family’s “Ber-Berry” co-op and bought a modest house at 2648 West Grand Boulevard. He moved his young family into the upstairs apartment and turned the back photo studio into a recording room he nicknamed “Studio A.” Over the door out front, he hung a homemade sign that read “Hitsville U.S.A.”
What came out of that little house is almost hard to believe. Between 1959 and 1972, Motown recorded a long string of number-one hits with the Supremes, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, the Jackson 5 and Smokey Robinson. Gordy ran it like one of Detroit’s auto plants — a hit assembly line, complete with a finishing school that taught young artists how to walk, talk and carry themselves on a world stage. The house band, the Funk Brothers, was so prolific that the 2002 documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown opens by declaring they played on more number-one hits than the Beatles, Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys combined.
Gordy moved the company to Los Angeles in 1972, but his sister Esther Gordy Edwards saved the original house and its treasures, opening it as the Motown Museum in 1985. Today it’s one of Michigan’s most beloved landmarks.
Where to see it
The Motown Museum / Hitsville U.S.A. at 2648 West Grand Boulevard, Detroit. Heads up: the historic house paused its guided tours on January 20, 2026, for a major expansion, with reopening planned for Spring 2027 — so check motownmuseum.org before you go, since exhibits and the campus store may keep different hours during construction.