Mork and Mindy: How a Sitcom Put Boulder on the Map
Near Boulder, Colorado
The house at sixteen-nineteen Pine Street in the Whittier neighborhood is a Victorian house said to date to eighteen eighty-three. It has a broad covered porch, ornamental woodwork at the gables, and the particular settled dignity of a house that has stood for a century and a half. It also has, at most hours, a small cluster of people on the sidewalk taking photographs.
The house was chosen in nineteen seventy-eight as the exterior of Mindy McConnell's apartment in Mork and Mindy, the ABC sitcom that launched Robin Williams into national stardom. Williams played Mork, an alien from the planet Ork sent to Earth to observe human behavior. He wore rainbow suspenders. He sat on his head. He improvised at a speed that overwhelmed the laugh track.
The show was set in Boulder, a college town that felt intelligent and slightly unconventional, a place that might not be surprised to find an alien living upstairs. Boulder in nineteen seventy-eight was, in certain respects, exactly that.
All interior scenes were shot on a Paramount soundstage in Hollywood. But the exterior shots were real Boulder: the Pine Street house, the Pearl Street Mall, Boulder Canyon, the goalposts at Folsom Field. The opening credits, in particular, gave millions of American viewers their most detailed impression of what Boulder looked like.
The show ran from nineteen seventy-eight to nineteen eighty-two. It is now remembered partly as a sitcom and partly as an elegy, because Robin Williams, who was from it and of it and irreplaceable, died in twenty fourteen.
