Madonna's Adolescent Home For Sale

By Stephen M. Silverman

08/27/2001 at 12:00 PM EDT

As Madonna prepared for a pair of weekend performances in her hometown Detroit area, including one that was broadcast live on HBO Sunday night, the four-bedroom Rochester Hills, Mich., house where she grew up went up for auction on the Internet. Precisely, she lived there from the sixth grade until she attended the University of Michigan. (She currently has homes in London, New York and Los Angeles, all in the multi-million-dollar range.) The eBay auction site lists the 1960s-era, 2,739-square-foot colonial with red brick on the bottom and white aluminum siding on the second story for a minimum bid of $324,000. Ted Andres of Rochester Hills, a real estate investor who bought the house about a month ago from Madonna's father, Silvio "Tony" Ciccone, and his wife, Joan Ciccone, is the seller. The Ciccones moved to the Traverse City area, where they run a winery. By Thursday night, reported the Detroit Free Press, one bid had arrived, from a person with the online handle "Bad White Rapper." That person withdrew the bid Thursday evening, and there were no bids as of Friday morning. The number of hits on pictures of the home jumped from a sluggish 1,100 after two days to 1,800 in a two-hour span Thursday evening. Bidding was scheduled to end Sept. 20 -- six days after Madonna gives her final "Drowned World Tour" performance, in L.A.