Fifteen-year-old Brandon Blumke rode his bike nearly 5 miles from his home in Eastpointe today, planning to re-create Eminem LP covers with himself as the star, sitting on the porch of the metro Detroit rapper’s boyhood home in Detroit.
Instead, he was greeted in the 19000 block of Dresden with a backhoe and demolition crew, the burned shell of the bungalow already loaded into a couple of semi trucks.
“I was going to take a picture on the steps like he originally did a long time ago — but it didn’t happen,” Brandon said this afternoon, sitting on his BMX bike across the street from a demolition crew digging out the basement. “I had no idea. It sucks it got torn down. I thought they were going to try to make it a museum.”
The abandoned bungalow, owned by Eminem’s mother in the late 1980s and early ’90s, burned Nov. 7, destroying the attic floor and charring much of the interior. The house was most recently owned by the Michigan Land Bank, a government program that manages and auctions abandoned and foreclosed properties.
