The Notorious B.I.G.'s childhood home

This is the childhood home of the Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace).

It is located at 226 St. James Place in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

Wallace grew up in apartment 3L on the third floor with his mother, Voletta, who was a preschool teacher. His father, Selwyn George Latore, left the family when he was two years old.

Although the rapper described it as a "one-room shack" in his 1994 debut single, Juicy, his mother later clarified that it was actually spacious.

Property websites indicate that the 1,133 sq ft apartment has three bedrooms, a den, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a dining room.

Since Wallace lived here, the unit has been extensively renovated. The surrounding neighborhood has also undergone significant gentrification.

In June 2024, the unit was listed for rent at $5,100 per month.

As a teenager, Wallace became involved in selling drugs. Despite being an honor student, he dropped out of high school at the age of 16-17 to pursue "the street life."

During his late teens, he began moving between "trap houses" in New York and Raleigh, North Carolina. In the early 1990s, he spent nine months in a North Carolina jail for selling crack cocaine. He later pled guilty to three counts of drug possession.

After getting out on bail, Wallace began focusing on music. In 1991, he created his first demo tape, which was titled Microphone Murderer. The tape proved to be a hit, as it later led to him being featured in the "unsigned hype" section of The Source magazine. Shortly afterwards, a talent director named Sean "Puffy" Combs signed him to Uptown Records.

In 1993, Wallace followed Combs to his newly established record company, Bad Boy Records. One year later, he released his debut studio album, Ready to Die.

The album received widespread critical acclaim, making him one of the most prominent hip-hop artists of the era.

While he was working on his second album, Wallace was dragged into the growing East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry. During this period, his former friend, rapper Tupac Shakur, began to repeatedly attack him on diss tracks. Shakur also accused Wallace of being involved in the 1994 Quad Studios shooting that left him wounded.

In September 1996, Shakur was murdered in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. Due to the tensions between the pair, Wallace became one of several suspects in the killing.

Approximately six months later, on March 9th, 1997, an unknown gunman shot Wallace four times outside a Soul Train Awards after-party at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, California.

Wallace was later pronounced dead at the age of 24.

His murder remains unsolved to this day.