Colonial Street in Los Angeles is a place where no real people have lived for the past 85 years. Despite the pretty facades, green lawns and white picket fences, all these houses are just a beautiful illusion. This is where the events of the series Desperate Housewives took place, and not only.
Where Desperate Housewives was filmed
This street was created in the 1940s as a large-scale film set on the territory of the Universal Pictures studio. At first, the houses were erected as temporary pavilions, but over time they were assembled into an entire street, where the facades easily changed their appearance for different projects, from classic films with Humphrey Bogart to cult series like Buffy and Murder, She Wrote.
Hollywood's Biggest Mystery
In 2004, the street was renamed Wisteria Lane, after the neighborhood from Desperate Housewives. Each house here was “inhabited” by a show character: Gabi Solis, Susan Mayer, Bree Van de Kamp… In reality, most of the buildings are empty “shells” with two or three walls. The interiors were filmed in studios, and some of the houses were used as warehouses between shoots.
The street exists solely to film long shots, and that’s its magic. There are no real residents here, but there are memories of dozens of films and TV series that have become part of world pop culture. Colonial Street is not a residential area, but an open-air museum, where the history of Hollywood is hidden behind each facade.
