Small wood frame houses climb a hillside grid to the corner where the traffic light runs green over red.
What Tipperary Hill looks like
Streets climb the hill in a tight grid of two story wood frame houses on narrow lots. Porches run along the fronts, and small lawns sit behind low iron fences. Partway up the grade the rooftops open onto a view back toward downtown Syracuse. Near the top, the houses give way to a short run of corner storefronts and taverns.
At the signal hangs green on top and red below, the only light of its kind in the country. A small paved park sits at the corner, with a bronze statue group of four figures in period dress, one of them pointing up at the light. Flags fly over its low stone edging.
stands on North Lowell Avenue, a Gothic Revival brick basilica built in 1871 and 1872 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A few blocks over, has five green onion domes over a red brick front at Tompkins Street and South Wilbur Avenue.
occupies a green painted corner building on South Lowell Avenue, red awnings running the length of its porch and the name lettered over the door. The holds its own corner further down Avery Avenue. Both draw a crowd of about 30,000 for the neighborhood's St. Patrick's Day parade each year.
Shot in Tipperary Hill
Adult World, shot entirely in Syracuse in 2013, filmed at the Tipperary Hill traffic light intersection. The crew worked the corner itself, signal and all, rather than a built version of it.
Adult World, 2013
Tompkins Street and Milton Avenue
The scene uses the corner as it stands, the green over red signal hanging over the intersection. Houses climb away on three sides, and the small memorial park sits on the fourth. Street View
The Slopes climb from the river on the same kind of tight grid, with small wood frame and frame over brick houses stacked up the hillside on narrow lots. Steps and short dead end streets break up the grid more than Tipperary Hill's does. Pittsburgh's public staircases are unmistakably Pittsburgh in a wide shot, so a street near the bottom of the Slopes holds the closer match to Tipperary Hill's simpler grid. Try searching hillside wood frame houses now.
Uptown Butte in Butte, Montana
Uptown Butte was built by Irish mining families on a hillside grid of modest frame houses, the same building period as Tipperary Hill's own. It stands as a mining town core rather than a neighborhood inside a larger city, with corner taverns still doing business on the flats below. Butte's cottages carry more gable and bay window ornament than Tipperary Hill's plain porches, and the open pit and old headframes on the skyline need to stay out of any wide shot. Try searching Irish mining town houses now.
Flint in Fall River, Massachusetts
Flint's wood frame two and three family houses on a rising street grid are close in scale to Tipperary Hill's, from the same building period. The neighborhood grew up around mill work rather than around a hillside overlooking a city centre. Fall River's granite mill buildings sit at the bottom of nearly every sightline and would need to be framed out to avoid placing the location in a mill town. Try searching wood frame two family houses now.
