Wide boulevards of large houses in many revival styles, and the street where AMC's Low Winter Sun found Reverend Lowdown's home.
What Boston-Edison looks like
and run the length of the district as wide streets with a landscaped median down the middle. Large detached houses sit well back from the curb behind deep lawns. Most are two full storeys or taller, in brick, stone or stucco.
The Berry Gordy mansion at 918 West Boston Boulevard is a stone Italian Renaissance villa with a red tile roof and a columned porch across the front. Henry Ford's former house on Edison Street is dark red brick with white stone trim and a columned entrance under a deep porch roof.
Not every house here is a mansion. Some side streets have plainer brick foursquares with one full width porch, set close enough to their neighbors to almost share a driveway. On , near the John C. Lodge Freeway, one house in a run of matching brick porches has a window boarded over.
sits among the boulevards as an open green square with mature trees around its edges and a walking path through the middle. Along Chicago Boulevard, cars park at the curb on both sides of the road, with the median's own trees forming a second line down the center.
Shot in Boston-Edison
For the AMC series Low Winter Sun, a Detroit location team searched Indian Village and then West Village before settling on a house on Atkinson Avenue. The show used it for Reverend Lowdown's home, one of the harder locations to secure that season.
Low Winter Sun, 2013
Atkinson Avenue
Played Reverend Lowdown's house, present day
The house needed a big backyard for the family's cookouts and a detached garage kept apart from the rest of the property. Atkinson Avenue's run of large brick houses, six blocks between the Lodge Freeway and Linwood Avenue, gave the crew the scale they were looking for. Street View
What Boston-Edison can double for
Westmoreland Place in St. Louis, Missouri
Westmoreland Place is a private, gated boulevard of large Tudor Revival and Georgian Revival houses set back on deep lots, platted at the same scale as Boston-Edison's own boulevards. Kingsbury Place next door has the same beaux-arts entry gates and matching setbacks. The private gates at each end look more exclusive than anything in Boston-Edison, so a wide shot that includes one would need to avoid it or dress around it. Try searching gated boulevard of large houses now.
Kenwood in Chicago, Illinois
Kenwood has the same kind of wide, landscaped boulevard, its mansions on Drexel Boulevard and Greenwood Avenue built by the same wave of early automobile and industrial wealth. Architects including Frank Lloyd Wright and Howard Van Doren Shaw worked there, so the range of revival and Prairie styles is just as broad. Kenwood's median is planted more densely and its houses run closer to the sidewalk on some blocks, so a wide establishing shot needs a block without newer infill nearby. Try searching wide landscaped boulevard mansions now.
North Meridian Street in Indianapolis, Indiana
North Meridian Street has the same period mansions, wide boulevard scale and mix of Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival and Classical Revival architecture as Boston-Edison. Both are wide boulevards of large houses built for the same wave of early auto era wealth. Meridian Street itself has more traffic and modern signal poles at its intersections, which need to stay out of frame or be dressed for an earlier decade. Try searching wide boulevard of period mansions now.
