Minneapolis – IAMNOTASTALKER

August 19, 2010July 27, 2010

Franklin Library from “Beautiful Girls”

The final Beautiful Girls filming location that I stalked while visiting Minnesota this past May was the library where Tommy “Birdman” Rowland (aka Matt Dillon) met up with his married girlfriend Darian Smalls (aka Lauren Holly) and her daughter, Kristen (aka Sarah Katz), towards the end of the flick. I found this location, once again, thanks to fellow stalker Owen and his Beautiful Girls master locations list. And even though it was only featured in a very brief scene in the movie, for whatever reason, I was absolutely DYING to stalk the place. Unfortunately though, we ended up stalking it during our last day in the North Star State and it happened to be POURING rain at the time, which is why I look like such a dork in the above photograph.

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The Franklin Library first opened almost a century ago thanks to a gift from philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. In 1912, the Scottish-American businessman decided to donate $125,000 to the Minneapolis Public Library in order to build four new area branches. The Franklin Community Library, which was designed by New York architect Edward L. Tilton, was the first of those branches to be constructed. The land on which the library now stands was donated to the city by Minneapolis real estate tycoon Sumner T. McKnight. The Renaissance Revival-style building, which cost $41,000 to construct, first opened in August of 1914 and had its formal dedication ceremony on January 29, 1915. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000 and, while it underwent an extensive renovation in 2005, I am very happy to report that it still looks almost the same today as it did when it first opened.

And the staff there literally could NOT have been nicer – once they got over their initial confusion of why I was stalking the place, at least. Like the cashier working the front register at the Marine General Store in Marine on Saint Croix, which I had stalked just a few days beforehand, when I first asked about the filming of Beautiful Girls, the librarians on duty mistakenly thought that I wanted to rent the flick, not take pictures of where it had been filmed. 😉 Once they understood my purpose for being there, though, they were highly amused and one of them offered to take me and my parents on a mini-tour of the premises and then photocopied a bunch of historic information about the library for me to take home. Yay!

In Beautiful Girls, Tommy and Darian meet up, and then subsequently break up, while sitting in front of one of the library’s massively-large fireplaces. Because the library has no less than four similarly-looking fireplaces, though, pinpointing the exact one where filming took place proved to be a bit of a challenge. But after taking photographs of each of them and comparing those photographs to screen captures from the movie, I can say with 99.9% certainty that the east fireplace is the one which appeared in the movie.

As you can see in the above photographs, though, the fireplace and its surrounding area look a bit different today than they did back in 1996 when Beautiful Girls was filmed. According to the librarian that I spoke with, both the east fireplace and the one located directly across from it were restored back to their original 1914 state during the library’s 2005 renovation.

The super-cute student film Butterflies was also shot on location at the Franklin Library.

Big THANK YOU to Owen for finding this location! 🙂

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: Franklin Library from Beautiful Girls is located at 1314 East Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The scene between Birdman and Darian was filmed in front of the library’s east fireplace, which is adjacent to the American Indian book collection. You can visit the library’s official website here.

May 20, 2010May 19, 2010

Bryant-Lake Bowl from “Beautiful Girls”

To appease my good friend and fellow stalker Mike, from MovieShotsLA, who has been on my case ALL WEEK about my constant Minnesota blogging, beginning tomorrow I will be returning to my old stomping grounds, so to speak, by writing about locales in the Los Angeles area. Unfortunately for Mike, though, there are still quite a few North Star State locations in my backlog that I’ve yet to post about. So, I guess I’ll just have to intermix them with my L.A. locales from this point forward – otherwise Mike might very well stop reading my blog! 🙂 For today, though, I thought I’d do a post about Bryant- Lake Bowl, the combination restaurant/bar/bowling alley/live stage theatre that appeared in fave movie Beautiful Girls. I found this location, of course, thanks to fellow stalker Owen and his Beautiful Girls master locations list. Thank you, Owen!

From what I have been able to gather online, Bryant-Lake Bowl, which was originally just a bowling alley, has been a Minneapolis staple for ages upon ages, although I am unsure of the exact date that it first opened. As fate would have it, though, in 1993, a woman named Kim Bartmann stopped in to bowl a few games and immediately decided she just had to buy the place. She sought out the owner and begged him to sell to her, which he eventually did, and Kim quickly set about not only transforming they alley’s former arcade room into an 85-seat live theatre venue, but also added a restaurant to the mix. Sadly, though, this was yet another restaurant that I did not get a chance to eat at while in Minnesota because, as I’ve said before, there were just far too many locations and not enough time to properly stalk them all. 🙁 Which is quite a shame, too, as apparently the place serves up some killer grub! Bryant-Lake Bowl’s menu includes such savory items as asparagus risotto, pad thai, and cooked-to-order, organic, grass-fed, free-range bison hash! Not your typical bowling alley fare, you say? Well, that’s exactly the point! Kim wanted to give her patrons a gourmet restaurant experience in the unlikeliest of places. The idea quickly caught on and Bryant-Lake Bowl is now THE place to be on Friday and Saturday nights.

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Bryant-Lake Bowl is also something of a celebrity hotspot, as well. According to one of the super nice servers I spoke with, Matt Dillon is a huge Bryant-Lake Bowl fan and dines there regularly whenever he is in town. In fact, I am fairly certain that the only reason the restaurant was chosen as a location for Beautiful Girls was because of Matt Dillon’s connection to the place. According to online reviews, actor Josh Hartnett, who grew up in nearby St. Paul, is also a frequent patron of the bowling alley.

In Beautiful Girls, Bryant-Lake Bowl stood in for the restaurant where Paul Kirkwood’s (aka Michael Rapaport’s) former girlfriend Jan (aka Martha Plimpton) worked as a waitress. In the very beginning of the movie, Paul shows up to the bowling alley in a moment of spontaneity to propose to Jan with a “champagne-colored” engagement ring, even though he knows that she has long since been dating someone else – a man whom Paul has dubbed “Victor, the Meat-Cutter”. Victor is a running joke throughout the movie due to the fact that Paul cannot comprehend how his ex-girlfriend Jan, a vegetarian, can act with such hypocrisy by dating a person who cuts meat for a living. LOL

Filming took place both inside Bryant-Lake Bowl and on the sidewalk directly in front of the restaurant’s main entrance.

The Season 4 episode of Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives entitled “Totally Unexpected” was also filmed at Bryant-Lake Bowl, during which host Guy Fieri sampled the restaurant’s Smoked Trout and Beet Salad with Green Goddess Dressing. You can watch the episode by clicking above.

According to the waitress I spoke to, the bowling alley was also featured in the 1999 movie Grumpier Old Men, but I rented the flick last night and did not see the place anywhere. I’m guessing that either the scene that was filmed there wound up on the cutting room floor or that the waitress mistakenly mixed up movie titles when telling me about which productions had been filmed on the premises.

Big THANK YOU to Owen for finding this location! 🙂

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: Bryant-Lake Bowl is located at 810 West Lake Street in Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can visit the official Bryant-Lake Bowl website here.

May 18, 2010May 17, 2010

The Johnson Inn Restaurant from “Beautiful Girls”

The other Beautiful Girls location that I was most excited about stalking (second only to the main houses used in the movie, of course), while in Minnesota two weeks ago, was the Johnson Inn – the local “Knight’s Ridge, Massachusetts” watering hole where Willie Conway (aka Timothy Hutton), Tommy “Birdman” Rowland (aka Matt Dillon), Paul Kirkwood (aka Michael Rapaport) and the rest of the gang hung out in the flick. Interestingly enough, two locations actually stood in for the Johnson Inn in Beautiful Girls – one location was used for the interior scenes, while a second one was used for the exteriors. Fellow stalker Owen tracked down both locales for me thanks to his Beautiful Girls master locations list, but, sadly, while the exterior location is still alive and well, the interior – a Minneapolis-area restaurant named Winfield Potters – closed its doors over a decade ago. 🙁 But because the locations were the site of one of my very favorite scenes from the movie, I just had to stalk both of them.

The above-mentioned favorite scene – and believe me, I know that over the past week I’ve described numerous Beautiful Girls scenes as my “favorite” 🙂 – involves professional piano player Willie Conway leading his buddies in a sing-a-long of the classic Neil Diamond song “Sweet Caroline”. And even though my dad has been a lifelong fan of the singer, before watching Beautiful Girls for the first time back in 1996, I don’t think I had ever heard any Neil Diamond songs in their entirety. But once I saw the Beautiful Girls “Sweet Caroline” scene, that was it for me – I suddenly, and unexpectedly, became a total ND junkie! Even now, fourteen years later, I am still a HUGE fan and my iPod is stocked with pretty much every song the guy ever recorded. All thanks to one very brief scene from a movie that premiered almost one and a half decades ago.

Because the “Sweet Caroline” scene had such a huge impact on me, I was absolutely DYING to stalk the spot where Willie C. and Company had so memorably belted out that “good times never seemed so good”. So, you can imagine my heartbreak when Owen emailed me to let me know that Winfield Potters restaurant, which did indeed used to have a piano in the bar area for patrons to play, was no longer. UGH! Such an incredible bummer! But I still just had to stalk the restaurant’s former location, which has since been turned into an office building for a company called Clientek.

According to a super nice and very informative waiter at a nearby restaurant my parents and I had dined at earlier that day, the Winfield Potters patio used to be quite the popular spot for Minnesota diners during the warm summer months. So, amazingly enough, once Clientek took over the space, they opted to keep the patio intact in order to host barbeques and events for their employees during temperate weather.

While there, I was absolutely FLOORED to discover a plaque honoring the former Winfield Potters location on the wall outside of the patio area. So darn cool! Of course, I think there should also be a notation on the plaque which touts the restaurant’s cinematic history, as well, but I digress.

I, of course, also peeked inside the Clientek offices to see if I could spot any small piece of the restaurant which still remained, but, sadly, there wasn’t anything. I can’t tell you how heartbreaking this particular stalk was for me, as I had so badly wanted to see Willie C.’s piano. Sigh.

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I am happy to report, though, that the Marine General Store, the small grocery store which was used for the exterior shots of the Johnson Inn, looks very much the same today as it did when Beautiful Girls was filmed back in 1996. There are some differences, of course, but for the most part, the location is very recognizable from the movie.

And, even though no filming actually took place there, I just had to stalk the interior of the General Store, as well. While doing so, I asked the girl at the front counter if the movie Beautiful Girls had been filmed on the premises, to which she said, “I don’t know. Let me check.” She then proceeded to pull up a list of about one hundred movies on her computer screen. Well, let me tell you, I took one look at that list and just about passed out from excitement and said, “WOW! How many movies have been filmed here?” The girl looked at me utterly flabbergasted and explained, “This is the list of movies we have for rent. I thought you were inquiring about a movie rental.” LOL As I mentioned in a previous post, I am rapidly discovering that most people in this world have never even heard of Beautiful Girls, including, apparently, people who work at locations where filming of the movie actually took place!

Anyway, the girl at the counter, who was very nice, directed me to the manager of the store, who, amazingly enough, had actually heard of Beautiful Girls and even knew about its filming. She told me that the big fight scene between Tommy “Birdman” Rowland and Steve Rossmore (aka Sam Robards) at the end of the film took place in the General Store’s back parking lot.

Unfortunately, though, there was a van parked in front of the stairway that Tommy walks down in the scene, so I couldn’t get a perfect shot of it.

You can watch the Beautiful Girls “Sweet Caroline” scene by clicking above.

Big THANK YOU to Owen for finding these locations for me! 🙂

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: The exterior of the Johnson Inn Restaurant from Beautiful Girls is the Marine General Store, which is located at 101 Judd Street in Marine on Saint Croix, about twelve miles north of Stillwater. The interior of the Johnson Inn was the former Winfield Potters restaurant, which used to be located at 212 2nd Street SE in Minneapolis.

May 10, 2010May 9, 2010

“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” Apartment Building

In 1975, after the real-life owner of The Mary Tyler Moore Show house put a big, fat ixnay on letting the series do any more filming on her property, producers decided to move their spunky heroine to the newly-built, multi-colored apartment complex known as Cedar Square West in the Cedar-Riverside area of Minneapolis. My parents and I had actually driven by the complex, which is now called Riverside Plaza, numerous times during our stay in the North Star State – and had often commented on what an eyesore it was – but it wasn’t until stumbling upon John Weeks’ Mary Tyler Moore Show locations website while killing time at the Mayo Clinic that I realized the place was a filming location. Once I learned that the building stood in for the home of Mary Richards during the final two seasons of the iconic series, I decided I just had to write a blog post about it, which I did during the 90-minute car ride from Rochester back to Minneapolis this past Friday morning. I had planned on taking photographs of Riverside Plaza once we reached our destination, but, sadly, it rained pretty much all day on Friday, so I put it off, thinking the pictures would not come out very well. I figured I could snap a few photos the following morning while on our way to the airport to fly back home. Since we had passed Riverside Plaza on our way into town after first landing in Minneapolis the week prior, I thought it would stand to reason that we would also pass it on our way out of town while heading back to the airport, but that’s not exactly what happened. For whatever oddball reason, our GPS unit took us on an alternate route to the airport, a route which did not go past Riverside Plaza, and I therefore never got any photographs of the place! UGH! But since I had already written the content about the locale, I decided to do a post on it anyway. Which landed me in uncharted territory – a blog post with no photographs to go with it. Thankfully, though, I found a video about the Plaza on the MinnPost news website, from which I was able to make the screen captures which appear above and throughout the rest of this post. Thank you, MinnPost! 🙂 And let that be a lesson to me – never write a blog post without first taking pictures of the subject on which I am writing. 😉

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Riverside Plaza, which is comprised of six towers, was constructed in 1973 by modernist architect Ralph Rapson and was modeled after a multi-use residential housing design known as Unite d’Habitacion, which was created by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, aka Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris (try saying that one three times fast!). The towers were designed in the very aptly-named brutish-style and, in my never-to-be-humble opinion, stick out like a sore thumb in the otherwise beautiful skyline that makes up Downtown Minneapolis. The buildings are such an eyesore, in fact, that each time my family drove past them, one of us would comment on their not-so-aesthetic appearance. Rapson was inspired to build the complex after a vacation in Europe, during which he discovered similar style communities in which groups of different economic and cultural backgrounds lived together in close proximity. He originally envisioned Riverside Plaza to be comprised of 11 buildings with 12,500 different apartment units which would house over 30,000 people. His vision was never realized, however. The developer funding the project defaulted on his loans and only six buildings, comprised of 1,303 individual units, were completed. Supposedly, there are several “skyways” – covered walking bridges which connect buildings – on the premises which were never finished and therefore lead to nowhere. Because 50% of the units are subsidized housing, the complex is currently home to a large number of low-income residents. According to quite a bit of information online, the Plaza is rundown, infested with crime and drugs, and is colloquially called “the crack stack”, which is why I had only planned on taking pictures of the place from afar. 😉 Riverside Plaza is scheduled to undergo a $90 million renovation project in the near future in order to make the place more energy-efficient and is currently being considered for Historic Landmark status. Being that so many Minnesota residents despise the place, though, I have serious doubts that the status will be awarded. You can see a great photograph of Riverside Plaza here.

Riverside Plaza first appeared in the Season 6 episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show which was aptly entitled “Mary Moves Out”. Mary continued to be a resident of the building throughout the remaining two seasons of the series, which ended in 1977.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: Riverside Plaza, aka Mary Richards’ apartment building on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, is located at 1600 South 6th Street in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

May 7, 2010May 7, 2010

“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” House

Well, after three days and a whopping (insert sarcasm here) three tests (including a blood test, an ultra-sound, and a CAT scan, each of which my dad has undergone numerous times with his doctors at home over the past two years), we have been discharged from the Mayo Clinic sans diagnosis. The doctor’s sole recommendation was to see a pain specialist back in L.A. UGH! Would Dr. House have given up so easily? I don’t think so! Oh, if only the real world was like T.V.! Anyway, we are heading back to Minneapolis tomorrow (where I will hopefully get to do a bit more stalking) and then we are flying to Los Angeles on Saturday morning. As I said yesterday, though, our trip wasn’t a total waste – we had a blast in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Stillwater. So, now, on with the stalking! Another Minneapolis filming location that fellow stalker Owen clued me onto was the apartment house where Mary Richards lived during the first five seasons of the iconic television series The Mary Tyler Moore Show. And, even though I have yet to watch even one episode of the show, as I mentioned yesterday, I just had to stalk the place because of its huge significance in television history. On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary supposedly lived in Unit D of a large apartment house located at 119 North Weatherly Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota. And, while the show was filmed primarily in the Hollywood area, all of the exteriors were shot on location in the Great Lake State. The series was created by producers James L. Brooks and Allan Burns in 1970 and the two included a highly-detailed description of their leading lady’s studio apartment in the original treatment of the pilot script. As you can see on fave website Hooked on Houses, where a copy of that script is posted, Mary’s apartment was originally described as “A room. Actually an entire apartment, but a single large room. There are some – mostly of the working-girl variety – who would consider this place a “great find”: ten-foot ceilings, pegged wood floors, a wood-burning fireplace, and, most important, a fantastic ceiling-height corner window.” Location scouts found that window – and the incredibly picturesque house to which it belonged – near the Lake of the Isles on Kenwood Parkway in Minneapolis. And, although actress Mary Tyler Moore never actually set foot inside of the residence, production designers did, whereupon they painstakingly measured and photographed the now-famous third-floor window so that it could be replicated on a soundstage at CBS Studios. And, thus, one of the most well-known sets in television history was born.

As the television series grew in popularity, so did Mary’s Queen Anne-style residence. The “Mary Tyler Moore house”, as it soon came to be called, became an almost immediate tourist attraction, overwhelming and angering the then-owner. According to journalist Neal Karlen’s January 12, 1995 New York Times article about the property, actress Mary Tyler Moore stated that the woman who owned the place during the time the show was being filmed, “was overwhelmed by people showing up and asking if Mary was around.” Oh, to have such a problem! 😉 To prohibit location managers from shooting additional exterior footage of her home, the owner hung huge signs reading “Impeach Nixon” all over the property in 1973. It was at that point that producers decided to move Mary Richards to a new dwelling – a one-bedroom apartment in the Riverside Towers complex in Downtown Minneapolis. But that didn’t stop Mary’s former house from being a major tourist destination. As of 1995, it was still drawing as many as THIRTY tour buses A DAY, even though The Mary Tyler Moore Show had been off the air for close to two decades! But as Mary Tyler Moore herself said, “The outside of the house was so warm, cozy and soothing. As the nest of all these characters who invaded people’s hearts, the house was going to receive similar affection.” And it still does today, over thirty years later.

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The house, which was built in 1878 and was designed by architect Edward Stebbins, originally boasted 6 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms, and 6,461 square feet of living space. The dwelling was converted into an apartment home, much like it was portrayed to be on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, for a short time, but was transformed back into a single-family residence sometime before the year 1988, at which time the property was purchased by Evan Maurer, the then-director of the Minneapolis Art Institute. Evan and his wife, Naomi, at first regretted the purchase of the home due to the amount of attention it attracted, but in time they came to understand the appeal. Years later Evan said, “In some ways, it’s like we’re caretakers living inside a monument. Mary is a myth, but myths have great power. They answer questions, and they set up value systems. There’s something in the Mary ethos that’s very important to very many people. She’s the greatest mythic hero from this region since Paul Bunyan.” Evan also called the house “Minnesota’s version of Graceland”. Love it!

In 2005, a high school English teacher named Don Gerlach purchased the property from the Maurers for $1.1 million and gave the entire pad an extensive makeover and a significant add-on with the hopes that he would be able to flip it for a profit in a little over a year’s time. Which is exactly what he did. In August of 2007, Don sold the home, which currently boasts 8 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms, a crafts room, a billiards room, an exercise room, nanny’s quarters, and a whopping 9,161 square feet of living space, for $2.8 million. During the renovation, the size of the kitchen was quadrupled and it now features four ovens, two refrigerators, two dishwashers, and a five-foot wide stovetop! Not kidding! Honestly, who needs a kitchen with TWO refrigerators and FOUR ovens??? My parents have two ovens at their house and I must say that they do come in handy on Thanksgiving, but FOUR ovens? Really? The new owners must do a heck of a lot of entertaining! 😉 You can watch a news report about the house which was filmed in 2006 here and you can see some great interior pics of the current interior on fave website Hooked on Houses here.

On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary Richards’ apartment was located behind the third-story Palladian windows pictured above. At the time the show was filmed, the area behind that window was, in actuality, just an unfinished attic. Today, it houses a media room, which the owners call the “Mary Tyler Moore Suite”. Love it!

The interior of Mary’s studio, which is pictured above, only ever existed, of course, on a soundstage in Hollywood.

The Kenwood neighborhood, where The Mary Tyler Moore house is located, is an absolutely beautiful area comprised of huge, picturesque houses with large, rolling front lawns . . .

. . . all situated around the gorgeous, tree-lined Lake of the Isles which boasts beautiful views of Downtown Minneapolis. I would LOVE to live there!

Big THANK YOU to Owen for telling me about this location! 🙂

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: Mary Richard’s apartment house from The Mary Tyler Moore Show is located at 2104 Kenwood Parkway, in the Kenwood area of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

May 6, 2010May 6, 2010

The Mary Tyler Moore TV Land Statue

Well, I am still here with my family at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. After a bit of a battle, my dad’s doctor finally agreed to reschedule some of his tests to yesterday afternoon. The results showed nothing, though, which isn’t that big of a surprise being that the tests the doctor scheduled were tests that my dad had already taken a multitude of times back in California. I had really been expecting a team of Dr. House-style, think-outside-the-box-type doctors to consult on my dad’s case, but, sadly, that’s not really how things work at the Mayo. We flew halfway across the U.S. for him to undergo a couple of tests that he had already taken in Los Angeles. There is one more test scheduled for this morning, but the doctor is fairly certain that it won’t show anything. Ah well, at least we tried. We’re not really sure of our next step, but it might be to visit Stanford University Hospital in Northern California. We’re thankful, though, that we at least got to see quite a bit of the state of Minnesota during our trip, and I have to say that we all absolutely fell in love with the place! My dad has even suggested that following my mom’s retirement next year, the two of them spend a few months in Minneapolis/St. Paul and Stillwater – two cities that we never would have gotten to see if it weren’t for some stalking sites located there. 😉 So, all is not lost. Anyway, on with today’s post . . . One of the first things my mom did upon learning that my dad had been accepted as a patient of the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, was research all of the famous filming that has taken place in the Great Lake State over the years. And there has actually been quite a bit of it, including that of one of my very favorite movies of all time – 1996’s Beautiful Girls, but more on that later. I also enlisted the help of fellow stalker Owen to add to my Minnesota stalking itinerary and, between the three of us, we came up with quite an extensive list comprising of roughly 22 locales in all. And, yes, my parents actually flew out to Minnesota a full day prior to my dad’s check-in date at the Mayo, just so that I could do some stalking! I know, I know – my parents are truly amazing! Anyway, one of the locations that Owen brought to my attention was the famous street corner where Mary Tyler Moore threw her hat in the air during the opening credits of the hit television series The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which ran on CBS from 1970 through 1977. And, even though I had never actually seen even one episode of the series, I, of course, knew of the iconic hat-throwing scene during which newly-single career woman Mary Tyler Moore tossed her tam o’shanter (a wool bonnet-style hat of Scottish origins) up in the air in the middle of a street in Downtown Minneapolis. The moment is so iconic in television history, in fact, that in 2002, the TV Land cable network erected an 8-foot tall bronze statue representing Mary in the exact spot where filming took place back in 1970. So, of course, I just had to stalk it!

Mary’s hat-throwing scene was actually ranked Number 2 on Entertainment Weekly’s list of “The 100 Greatest Moments in Television”. The first was the assassination and funeral of President John F. Kennedy. It’s odd to me that two such diametrically opposing moments in TV history – one joyous, the other incredibly tragic – would be ranked as number 1 and number 2 on EW’s list, but I digress.

I cannot express how incredibly cool I think it is that the TV Land network created a statue to commemorate such an iconic moment in television history. Oh, how I wish things like this were done more often! Apparently, TV Land has even developed something called the Landmarks Initiative, an organization whose sole goal is to recognize legendary television characters by placing commemorative statues in the locations in which those characters are most closely associated. How fabulous is that? Hopefully it’s only a matter of time before there are bronze renderings of Ross, Rachel, Phoebe, Joey, Monica, and Chandler out in front of the Friends building in New York. 😉 Ironically, when Mary’s statue was first announced, it stirred up quite a bit of controversy among certain individuals (who obviously had their underwear on too tight!) who complained that the City of Minneapolis should not be honoring a fictional television character. But as Larry W. Jones, the General Manager and Executive Vice President of the TV Land network, stated, “The indelible impression of Mary releasing the tam is one of the most celebrated symbols of freedom in modern society. By placing a statue in the original location where this image was captured, TV Land hopes this statue will remind passers-by of the freedom and optimism that Mary has come to represent.” So, take that, all of you naysayers! 😉 Despite the protests, the statue was finally erected on May 8, 2002 and both Mary Tyler Moore and the Mayor of Minneapolis were on hand for the unveiling.

The TV Land statue was designed by a sculptor named Gwendolyn Gillen and was chosen out of nineteen other designs by a panel of artists, which included Mary Tyler Moore herself.

Amazingly enough, before the unveiling there was actually quite a bit of debate as to where the hat-throwing scene had taken place. While The Mary Tyler Moore Show producers knew that the scene had been filmed somewhere on Nicollet Mall in Downtown Minneapolis, no one could seem to remember the exact spot where Mary stood, and because the area had changed so significantly in the almost four decades since filming took place, it was virtually impossible to determine. Further complicating the matter was the fact that the department store which appeared in the background of the scene had been completely destroyed in the Minneapolis Thanksgiving Day Fire of 1982. If only I had been blogging back in 2002, the TV Land executives could have called upon me and my fellow stalkers to determine Mary’s hat-throwing location. 😉 The correct spot was finally found thanks to Rodney Homstad, an eagle-eyed former police officer who had worked on the production back in 1970. You can read more about the search for the hat-throwing location here.

I honestly can’t recommend stalking this location enough! Even though I was not a fan of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I could NOT have been more excited to see the TV Land statue in person and to pose for a few photographs with it. 🙂

You can watch The Mary Tyler Moore Show opening credits, which feature the famous hat-throwing scene, by clicking above.

A big THANK YOU to Owen for telling me about this location and to all of my fellow stalkers for all of the well-wishes and prayers you’ve been sending. They have meant so much to me during these difficult past few days. I will keep you all posted on what happens.

Until next time, Happy Stalking! 🙂

Stalk It: The Mary Tyler Moore Show hat-throwing statue is located near the corner of 7th Street and Nicolette Mall, in front of Macy’s department store, in Downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota.