Iggy Pop Childhood Home — Ypsilanti, Michigan

James Newell Osterberg Jr. — Iggy Pop — was born on 21 April 1947 in Muskegon, Michigan, but grew up in a trailer park called Coachville Gardens in the Ypsilanti area, outside Ann Arbor. His father was an English teacher and his mother a secretary; their home was a modest trailer in a working-class community. The proximity to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan music scene would prove crucial — it was in this environment that Osterberg absorbed the Chicago blues tradition (he saw Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and James Brown perform in the early 1960s), played drums in high school bands, and eventually connected with the musicians who would form the Stooges.

Iggy Pop's trajectory from a Michigan trailer park to fronting one of the most confrontational and influential bands in rock history is one of the great American music stories. The Stooges — Iggy, guitarist Ron Asheton, drummer Scott Asheton, and bassist Dave Alexander — emerged from Ann Arbor in 1967 with a sound of extraordinary primitivism and physical intensity that would take decades to be properly recognised. Iggy's performances — self-mutilation, crowd-surfing, diving into the audience — established the vocabulary of punk performance years before punk existed as a genre.

The Coachville Gardens trailer park where Iggy grew up is in the Ypsilanti township area. It is not a formal heritage site. Ann Arbor, the nearby college town, has a stronger cultural relationship with Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and the Michigan music community has increasingly celebrated its connection to one of rock's most genuinely radical figures.