American Football House
house in Illinois, United States
The American Football House is a house in Urbana, Illinois, United States, known for its appearance on the cover of Midwest emo band American Football's 1999 debut album American Football. The house's interior was also featured on the cover of the band's 2016 second album, also titled American Football. The house has since become "one of music's biggest landmarks", attracting tourism, especially in the emo community.
History
Built in 1893, the American Football House is located at 704 West High Street in Urbana, Illinois, near the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. One of the house's earliest residents was Charles M. Webber, who died while living there in 1931. Two of Webber's great-great-grandchildren, Adam and Michael Thies, worked at Polyvinyl Records, the Champaign-based record label behind American Football.
In 1980, the house was purchased by local real estate investor Fred Krauss, the father of musicians Alison Krauss and Viktor Krauss. It was passed on in the mid-1990s to Viktor, who owned the house until selling it in 2001.
By the 1990s, the house had become a popular venue for college parties and punk concerts. While a student at the university in the late 1990s, photographer and album cover artist Chris Strong lived in the basement with his girlfriend.
The public source identifies “American Football House” as house in Illinois, United States. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around American, Football and House.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q119286048. Authority coordinates are 40.110, -88.217. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2016, 1893 and 1931.
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This entry incorporates text from “American Football House” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.