Uncle Buck: The John Hughes Classic, Revisited

Uncle Buck was shot where almost everything John Hughes made was shot: the northern suburbs of Chicago, inside a thirty-mile radius that also supplied Home Alone, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. That concentration is the interesting thing about this location file, and it is the reason the film is best visited as one stop on a North Shore circuit, not as a destination.

The film itself is a 1989 comedy about an unreliable relative left in charge of three children for a week. Nothing about the premise required a specific place, which is precisely why the locations are ordinary suburban streets, and why they have aged the way ordinary streets do, rather than the way landmarks do.

Where the film was made

AI

Why the North Shore

Hughes grew up in Northbrook and kept his production base in Illinois instead of moving it to California, which was unusual for a director of his commercial weight. The practical advantages were real: large houses with generous frontages that a crew could work around, mature street trees that read as established rather than new, quiet roads that a small municipality would close for a reasonable fee, and a downtown thirty minutes away for the city scenes.

The result is that a single afternoon's drive covers locations from half a dozen films. The USA master index lists the Chicago entries together for exactly that reason.

The diner and the interiors

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Making a day of it

Start in downtown Chicago at the Art Institute and Union Station, drive north through Evanston, and finish in Winnetka and Highland Park. That covers the Uncle Buck streets, the Home Alone house and the Ben Rose House in one loop of about forty miles, all of it on suburban roads.

Every residential location on that loop is somebody's home. None is marked, none is open, and several of the owners have had to deal with visitors on their lawns. Photograph from the footpath.

What has changed

The houses stand and have been altered in the ordinary way: new windows, new paint, grown landscaping. The commercial frontages have turned over completely. The school is unchanged and unvisitable. The suburbs themselves are the most intact part of the film, because a street of detached houses under mature trees is exactly the kind of place that does not get rebuilt.

For the wider index, see the location index and the United States hub.

The North Shore, film by film

The suburbs north of Chicago carry more recognisable private houses than anywhere else in the country, almost all of them from one director's output between 1984 and 1991. What sits within a forty-mile loop:

The Breakfast Club school is the cautionary entry: Maine North High School in Des Plaines was closed, used for the film, and later demolished. A location that is gone is gone, which is why the index carries a status on every row.

Driving the loop

Start downtown at the Art Institute and Union Station, take Lake Shore Drive north, then Sheridan Road up through Evanston, Wilmette, Kenilworth and Winnetka to Highland Park. About forty miles, half a day with stops, and the drive along the lake is worth it independently of any of the houses.

Sheridan Road is the route to take rather than the expressway: it follows the shoreline through the old suburbs, past Northwestern University and the Baháʼí House of Worship at Wilmette, which is open to visitors and is the most striking building on the loop.

Behaving at the houses

Every residential location on this loop is somebody's home. The Winnetka house in particular receives visitors daily, and the residents have asked repeatedly that people stay on the footpath. That request is reasonable and it is the whole rule: look from the path, do not go up a driveway, do not photograph through windows, and do not block a neighbour's access with a parked car.

This file gives a street number only where the address is already published by the owner or the property is a public building. Where it names a suburb instead, that is deliberate.

Season

Autumn is the right season for the North Shore: the street trees are the point of the streetscape, and October is when they are worth photographing. Winter is genuinely cold, the lakefront wind is the thing nobody plans for, and summer is humid and green enough that several of the houses are hidden behind foliage.

Frequently asked questions

Where was Uncle Buck filmed?

In the northern suburbs of Chicago, principally Evanston and the surrounding North Shore communities, with some interior work on stages. The house, the school and the neighbourhood streets are all within a few miles of each other, in the same suburbs John Hughes used for most of his Chicago films.

Can you visit the Uncle Buck house?

It is a private family home on an ordinary residential street. There is nothing to see beyond the front elevation from the footpath, and the correct behaviour is to look and move on. It has been repainted and altered since 1989.

Why do so many John Hughes films use the same suburbs?

Hughes grew up on the North Shore and based his production company in Illinois, and the suburbs gave him large detached houses, mature street trees and quiet roads that could be closed cheaply. Within about thirty miles of the Loop he had a school, a shopping centre, a station and a hundred streets that all read as generic middle America.

Is Uncle Buck worth a location trip on its own?

Not on its own. It is worth an afternoon added to a wider North Shore circuit that takes in the other Hughes locations; the Home Alone house in Winnetka and the Ferris Bueller sites in Highland Park and downtown Chicago are within the same drive.