A Christmas Story House
Near Cleveland, Ohio
The frame house at three-one-five-nine West Eleventh Street in Cleveland's Tremont neighborhood is probably the most filmed residential exterior in Ohio. Built in eighteen ninety-five, it served as the home of the Parker family in Bob Clark's nineteen eighty-three holiday film A Christmas Story, the movie that turned a leg lamp, a Red Ryder BB gun, and the phrase "you'll shoot your eye out" into American shorthand for Christmas nostalgia. The production came to Cleveland primarily for Higbee's Department Store, then operating in the Terminal Tower on Public Square.
The house on West Eleventh handled the exterior shots. Twenty-one years after the film's release, a San Diego entrepreneur named Brian Jones bought the house on eBay for one hundred fifty thousand dollars, spent two years restoring it to its movie-era appearance, and opened it as a museum in two thousand six. The previous owners had covered the house in blue vinyl siding and modern windows, and Jones spent about two hundred forty thousand dollars gutting it and turning it back into a near replica of the movie set.
It opened on November twenty fifth, two thousand six, and drew four thousand three hundred visitors that first weekend. The interior scenes were filmed on a sound stage in Toronto, so the kitchen you remember was never inside this house. Across the street, a museum displays props including Randy's snowsuit and Miss Shields' chalkboard.
It is now open year round.
