Mary Richards’ apartment, as depicted on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, was every bit an icon of the ‘70s as she was. With its sunken living room, massive shag rug and pops of mustard that are, let’s face it, freaking hideous today, it was the ultimate bachelorette pad of its era. (Of course, Rhoda had the real decoration skills, but it wasn’t The Valerie Harper Show, at least not yet.) As creators James L. Brooks and Allan Burns describe it, it had “10-foot ceilings, pegged wood floors, a wood-burning fireplace, and, most important, a fantastic ceiling-height corner window,” which would be considered “a great find” by some, “mostly of the working-girl variety,” a choice of words they must have come to deeply regret.
Of course, the apartment only existed on the CBS studio lot, but it was introduced through exterior shots of a real Minneapolis mansion. At the sprawling white (now tan) Victorian, the space inside Mary’s window was actually just an unfinished attic, though in a real sign of the times, it has since been converted into a home office. It’s unclear how much, if any, contact the show’s producers had with the home’s occupants at the time; after all, there’s nothing illegal about filming the outside of someone’s house without their permission, even if you intend to broadcast it to millions of viewers every Saturday night. It was the millions of viewers, however, who soon became a problem.
In an impressive feat of pre-internet dedication, it didn’t take fans long to find out the real address of 119 North Weatherly. Even long after the series ended, up to 30 tour buses a day stopped by the house, unloading throngs of Mooreheads willing to pose for as many takes as they needed to get the perfect hat-throwing photo op, so you can imagine the fervor at the time. The owner “was overwhelmed by the people showing up and asking if Mary was around,” so when producers returned to get more footage for the next season, she was having none of it.
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To make sure any such footage would be unusable, she “draped huge ‘Impeach Nixon’ signs all over the house,” particularly beneath “Mary’s” window. This would be like hanging “Impeach Trump” signs in 2020, you know, back when that actually meant something.
It wasn’t exactly a position Mary would have disagreed with, but it wasn’t one CBS execs were keen to broadcast, so the owner held on to what little peace she still had. When she sold the home in 1988, the new owners had no idea their house was so famous until the tourists started showing up. They took it in stride until 2006, when they sold the house, which was sold again in 2017 for… $1.45 million?
That’s all? For a 9,000 square-foot Minneapolis Victorian with a gym, sauna, office, game room and “servants quarters”? Does anyone want to go in on a possibly haunted piece of pop-culture history?
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