If you've seen the old Judy Garland movie Meet Me In St. Louis, you surely remember their glorious house. How could you not??
When Joe and I moved to the Mason Lodge as newlyweds, smack in the middle of the Central West End neighborhood of St. Louis, we used to drive around and try to find the perfect street that could stand in for the street in Meet Me in St. Louis. Our own street, Westminster Place, was close--- it had such grand old houses, many built right around the 1904 World's Fair era the movie was set in. But the yards were shorter, the houses more closely set together... it wasn't quite right. And for all the other similar neighborhoods we'd explore in the five years we lived there, we never found quite the right looking street... Never THE house.
Just tonight, a friend linked a fun photo article from Harper's Bazaar that shows several of the most memorable houses in cinema history, and the bit about the Meet Me in St. Louis house actually gave the street address of the original turn-of-the-century home that the movie was based on. So for fun, I Google-mapped it.
Seriously--- check this out:
Top left is Kensington Ave., where the REAL Meet Me in St. Louis house used to be. Bottom middle is our old Mason Lodge. All those years, we were living less than a half mile from that street we always looked for, and we never knew it.
I love this.
Now, we would've never seen THE HOUSE--- it was demolished in 1996 or so. And the REAL house really isn't as incredibly grand as the movie house. The movie house was part of a set in Hollywood that stuck around and was used in other movies later--- and it was definitely more fancy than this actual one:
But still--- it feels like one of the little fun mysteries in my life has come full circle and I love that the answer was right under our noses all along.
For more fun information about the Meet Me In St. Louis house, both real and cinematic, this blog has a really good post with a lot of detail. Warning--- it might make you need to re-watch the movie again, ASAP. Which isn't really a bad thing.
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So cool! and I LOVE the new bog header and your pic!
ReplyDeleteUm, it IS a bad thing if you don't own it because then it's just torture wanting to watch the movie and not being able to.
ReplyDeleteWhich of course means I should just own it, and that I'm an idiot because I don't own it already. :)