Wednesday, January 22, 2020

"Back to the Future" houses

From mid-1997 to late-1999, I lived in Los Angeles, but did not visit (or even think to visit) any of the sites that appear in my favorite movie, Back to the Future.

On 1/21/20, I finally did seek out two particularly iconic locales from the film: the houses of Marty McFly and "Doc" Emmett Brown.

Marty's house is at 9303 Roslyndale Avenue in Arleta/Pacoima (I don't know why the name of the city alternates depending on the site). It does not look that different from 1985.


Doc's house is at 4 Westmoreland Place, Pasadena; this house is an architectural landmark that was famous before the film.


From this angle, you can see the garage where Doc built the 
not-to-scale/not-painted model of Hill Valley to demonstrate 
how they were going to send Marty back to the future. 
You can also see a historical plaque that 
does not mention Back to the Future.

Other sites I considered swinging by ended up being too far (Marty's high school, in Whittier, CA) or not real (the stone structures marking the entrance to Lyons Estates).

Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads...well, yeah, I did. And though I didn't get there in a DeLorean, it was indeed a wild trip back in time.

1 comment:

MacQuarrie said...

If you come to LA again and plan to see more BTTF sites, the mall parking lot Doc & Marty test the Deloran is the south side of Puente Hills Mall in Rowland Heights, just east of where Azusa Avenue crosses Colima Road. In the film you can see two major stores, Robinson's on the left and JC Penney on the right; the Robinson's is now Macy's, and the Penney's space has been divided between a 24-Hour Fitness and Burlington. The Photomat booth is long gone.