The John Coltrane House: Where Giant Steps Began

A North Philadelphia row house at fifteen eleven North Thirty-Third Street is not a place most visitors to the city would ever seek out. But for six years in the nineteen fifties, this building was one of the most important addresses in American music.

John Coltrane was born in Hamlet, North Carolina in nineteen twenty-six and came north to Philadelphia in nineteen forty-three, following the path of the Great Migration. He studied at the Ornstein School of Music and the Granoff Studios, playing in local rhythm-and-blues bands, slowly developing the technical command that would eventually redraw the boundaries of jazz. On July twenty-first, nineteen fifty-two, he purchased the row house at fifteen eleven North Thirty-Third Street for five thousand four hundred and sixteen dollars, moving in with his mother, his cousin Mary Alexander, and a childhood friend.

The years Coltrane spent in that Strawberry Mansion neighborhood were years of transformation. He joined the Miles Davis Quintet in nineteen fifty-five, appearing on the landmark album Kind of Blue in nineteen fifty-nine. He worked alongside Thelonious Monk. He overcame a debilitating heroin addiction, a struggle that biographers place largely within this house. And he composed Giant Steps, the nineteen sixty album whose harmonic architecture was so radical that it left other jazz musicians struggling to understand what he had done. Coltrane solves chord substitution problems here that had no previous solutions in the language of jazz.

He left the house in nineteen fifty-eight. The building sat vacant for years, damaged by fires, threatened with demolition. Preservation efforts finally gained traction in the twenty-twenties, with state blight remediation funds helping stabilize the structure and plans for a cultural center taking shape.

The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen ninety-nine. It is also, for anyone who has heard A Love Supreme or Giant Steps, a genuinely moving place to contemplate, a modest rowhouse where one of the twentieth century's most restless musical minds once sat up late, working through harmonics that the rest of the world would spend decades catching up to.