Happy Days: Let’s Visit the Cunningham House!

It’s time for another Sunday drive to see a TV show landmark! Gas is expensive though so this is a “virtual road trip.” Thanks to the folks at Google, we’re able to visit TV landmarks and see what’s really next door, across the way and down the street from the places we’ve grown to love — all from the comfort of our own homes. This week, it’s the Happy Days house.

The home belonging to “Mr. and Mrs. C.” turns out to be more affluent than one might expect the owner of a hardware store to have. The Cunninghams lived in their home at 565 North Clinton Drive in Milwaukee for the duration of Happy Days. That house saw a lot — from the arrival of an alien named Mork to the marriages of children Joanie and Richie and the strange disappearance of their older brother, Chuck.

Happy Days was spawned from an episode of Love, American Style and became its own series. The TV show centers around a typical American family in the ’50s and ’60s. Tom Bosley and Marion Ross play Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham, and Ron Howard and Erin Moran play their kids, Richie and Joanie. In the first two seasons they had an older brother, Chuck (Gavan O’Herlihy, then Randolph Roberts), but never returned home from college and was written out of the series. The very cool Fonz (Henry Winkler) became the kids’ surrogate older brother. Richie’s friends, Postie and Ralph Malph (Anson Williams, and Donny Most), are featured prominently in the series as well.

The interior of the Cunningham home changed dramatically beginning with season three. The front door moved completely from one side of the house to the other. The reason for this change was because the filming switched from being filmed with a single-camera and laugh track, to using three cameras and a live audience.

Throughout all of these changes however, the outside of the Milwaukee house remained the same. The exterior is a real house that actually resides at 565 North Cahuenga Boulevard, in Los Angeles. The house was chosen because it was felt that it looked like something that resembled middle America in the 1950s.

It’s a private residence but perhaps Chuck is hiding in one of the six bedrooms of this 3,904 sq. ft. home.

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