Second Empire and Italianate townhouses with mansard roofs ring a fenced Victorian park, and a house on Whittemore Place played a Chicago home in Up in the Air.
What Lafayette Square looks like
sits at the center of the neighborhood, a fenced park of about thirty acres with a grotto, iron bridges and a bandstand. Townhouse-lined streets ring it on every side.
Second Empire and Italianate townhouses line , and , two full storeys under a steep slate mansard roof with gabled dormers. Stone or limestone fronts carry arched doorways, bay windows and bracketed cornices, with plain brick on the side and rear walls. Cast iron fences and low stone walls run along the sidewalks, and clipped boxwood hedges front many of the houses.
Benton Place is its own enclosed court on the park's north side, houses set back from a shared lawn rather than the street. Some fronts are painted stucco in pale blues and creams, others bare stone or red brick, standing side by side without a repeated pattern. A former church stands at the corner of and Park Avenue. It is Gothic Revival in style, with rough cut stone walls, pointed arch windows and a slate roof.
runs along the park's west side toward South Jefferson. It keeps the same mansard roofline, on a narrower, tree shaded street. Missouri Avenue, which meets it at the park's west edge, mixes Queen Anne rowhouses with wide Italianate fronts.
Shot in Lafayette Square
In Up in the Air, the production used the house at 2340 Whittemore Place to play Alex's home in Chicago. It is the film's only scene inside Lafayette Square, one house on an unaltered residential block.
Up in the Air, 2009
Played Alex's home, Chicago, Illinois, present day
The house at 2340 Whittemore Place stood in for Alex's home in Chicago in Up in the Air. Its Second Empire mansard roof and stone front sit among near identical houses along the block. Street View
What Lafayette Square can double for
Logan Circle in Washington, District of Columbia
Second Empire and Italianate mansions with mansard roofs ring Logan Circle in the same 1870s to 1890s range as Lafayette Square, built at a similar scale around a formal park. Vermont Avenue and 13th Street NW carry the heaviest concentration of mansard roofs and bracketed cornices. The circle's own traffic pattern and taller rowhouses on its south side give it away in a wide shot, so a tighter frame toward the park reads closer to Lafayette Square. Try searching mansard mansions ring a circle now.
The stone townhouses on Delancey Street carry the same arched openings and mansard roofs as Benton Place, though built for a wealthier block and set closer together. Rittenhouse Square itself is more formally landscaped than Lafayette Park. Taller modern buildings stand behind the townhouses at Rittenhouse Square, unlike the low houses ringing Lafayette Park. Keep the angle low and tight to hold that skyline out of frame. Try searching stone townhouses on a square now.
Mount Vernon Place in Baltimore, Maryland
Rowhouses around Mount Vernon Place share Lafayette Square's scale and its formal park at the center, though Baltimore's fronts run more to red brick and marble steps than limestone and mansard roofs. Keep Mount Vernon's own monument out of a wide shot, since Lafayette Park has no monument at its center. Try searching rowhouses around a formal park now.
