What happened here?
Bob Dylan's childhood home at 2425 Seventh Avenue East in Hibbing, Minnesota, is where Robert Allen Zimmerman grew up from 1948 to 1959, when he left for the University of Minnesota and, shortly afterward, New York City and the transformation into Bob Dylan. The house is a modest two-storey home in Hibbing's Fairview neighbourhood, the kind of house that a hardware store owner in an Iron Range mining town might have occupied: comfortable, unremarkable, one of thousands on similar streets. It was here that Dylan heard Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, and Buddy Holly on the radio; here that he taught himself guitar; here that he formed his first band and played at the Hibbing High School auditorium.
Hibbing sits on the edge of the Hull-Rust-Mahoning Mine, one of the largest open-pit iron ore mines in the world -- a fact that gives the town a particular backdrop of industrial enormity against which Dylan's interior life was developing. The mine is visible from the edge of town; its scale is vertiginous. Dylan has referenced his Minnesota origins obliquely throughout his career, rarely with nostalgia and sometimes with deliberate evasion, having spent years obscuring his background in the construction of the Bob Dylan myth.
The house at 2425 Seventh Avenue East is a private residence. Hibbing has installed a Bob Dylan Drive and various heritage acknowledgements of its most famous son, including a section of the Zimmerman family home as part of a wider tour. The Hibbing Public Library maintains a Bob Dylan collection, and the town has made peace with an alumnus who spent decades trying not to be from there.