Graceland it isn't, but 20 Forthlin Road, home to the family of Sir Paul McCartney from 1955 to 1964, now belongs to the ages.
The National Trust - the conservation charity that normally measures its yesterdays in centuries - has bought it, restored its serviceable '50s appearance and is making it available to the public.When it opens on July 29 it will join a number of other Beatles attractions that have increased tourism to Liverpool, a troubled maritime city of faded glory that has struggled to recover from the lost prosperity of its days as an industrial center and Britain's principal trans-Atlantic port.
Bought for $91,000 and restored through a $78,000 grant, the house at 20 Forthlin Road is the most modern building the Trust has acquired and the first time it has bought a house associated with a living person.
The Trust says it was intent on reproducing the feeling of the time rather than an exact replica of what the house looked like when the McCartneys lived there and Paul wrote his first songs with John Lennon. A series of photographs by Mike McCartney, the musician's younger brother, are hung throughout the house, usually in the same room as the family moments that they capture occurred.
A two-story, three-bedroom unit in a row-house red-brick block on a street with a suburban feel, it was the home of the McCartney family from 1955, when Paul was 13, until 1964, when he had become such a celebrity that hordes of groupies staked out the front hedge. His father, Jim McCartney, left the house under cover at midnight to live in a house in the country that Paul bought for him with his newly earned fortune.
Paul's mother, Mary McCartney, died of breast cancer the first year they were in the house, leaving the rearing of the two boys to McCartney, then 53.