The Secret of Archie Bunker's House in Queens
Monday January 28, 2008
You thought the answer was Glendale... and Corona -- the question being, which Queens neighborhood was home to Archie and the whole Bunker clan? But I got some news to share.
When the topic of Archie Bunker -- America's most beloved 1970s TV bigot -- it's hard to parse here in Queens. The show was widely popular, rated #1 from 1972 to 1976 (see IMDB), and probably introduced Queens the borough to most Americans in the 1970s, but I wouldn't say in a good way. It was ground-breaking television, full of real characters, but the idea of Archie Bunker land became a way for people to dismiss the borough as a wasteland. But that wasn't true then, and it's certainly not now.
What do you think? Does Archie Bunker matter anymore to Queens? Has Queens grown beyond the All in the Family reputation? Did the long-running sitcom King of Queens displace the Bunkers in America's imagination of the borough? Or is there no forgetting Archie?
Please leave your comments below about Queens and Archive, and also if you got a response to the new info on the setting for All in the Family.
Comments
If I remember correctly, All in the Family was lifted from a British show. At the time o AITF many producers were adapting British tv shows for US audiences.
I grew up a 5 minute walk from the cooper street house,ofcourse I watched the show as well, it was a wonderful area with wonderful people. I wouldn’t have wanted to grow up anywhere else. Now though I live in California I’m in the area many times a year and find that it’s still an area that’s a hidden jewel
I grew up in the Jackson Heights/Elmhurst neighborhood. There were a number of references in the show to that section of Queens. Archie took the Number 7 train which runs right through Jackson Heights and the Jefferson’s dry cleaner was walking distance on Northern Blvd. Cooper Avenue in Glendale Queens is more like 4 or 5 miles away.
On more than one occasion, Archie recites his address as 704 Hauser Street, Astoria (not Corona).
Yes, Sophia. But there is no Hauser Street in Astoria. The descriptions and allusions in the show all point to an amalgam of Queens neighborhoods, not an actual real one. Still the story of the real Archie being from Jackson Heights is just too fun.
Geoff is right. The show was unquestionably based on a British hit called Till Death Do Us Part. Norman Lear also took some of the jokes from the behavior of his own parents. The notion that the show was based on one real family from Queens and suggested by someone close to them is pretty suspect. (Unless that person happened to suggest it to British producers first!)
Credits for AITF explicitly state that it is based on the British show “Till Death do Us Part”
Anybody who loves All in the Family as much as I do would be well advised to look up a motion picture from 1970 titled Joe.
This great flick stars Peter Boyle as the title character, a truly horrendous bigot who
could easily be the prototype for Norman Lear’s Archie Bunker.
I first saw the film on TV in the early 70’s,
and found a VCR copy in the closeout bin at a local video store in the late 1980’s.
It’s well worth seeking out for its many Queens references and the social commentary from that turbulent period. The scene that has Joe walking down his block in the shadow of the Brooklyn/Queens expressway has kept me guessing for many years: it looks so familiar but I just can’t place the exact street.
By the way, I read in a newspaper some years back (NY Newsday?) that the owners of the house on Cooper Ave. never received a dime or any type of credit from the All in the Family people, and were actually quite resentful about it!
Actually, the truth of “All In the Family” is this. “All In the Family” was a spinoff of a British comedy, “Till Death Us Do Part” is a British television sitcom that aired on BBC1 from 1965 to 1975. First airing as a Comedy Playhouse pilot, the series aired for seven series until 1975. Six years later, ITV continued the sitcom, calling it Till Death…. From 1985 to 1992, the BBC produced a sequel In Sickness and in Health.Created by Johnny Speight, Till Death Us Do Part centred on the East End Garnett family, led by patriach Alf Garnett (Warren Mitchell), a reactionary white working-class man who holds racist and anti-socialist views. His gentle and long-suffering wife Else was played by Dandy Nichols, and his daughter Rita by Una Stubbs. Rita’s bright but layabout husband Mike Rawlins (Antony Booth) is a socialist. The character Alf Garnett became a well known character in British culture, and Mitchell played him on stage and television up until 1998, when Speight died.Many episodes from the first three series are thought to no longer exist, having been wiped in the mid 70s as was the policy at the time.