The location: Lindsay's House.


Q. What is it supposed to be on the show?

    A. The residential home of Lindsay Gardner, the new, smart girl Ryan meets at school, and falls for. She eventually finds out that Caleb is her father and in so doing she becomes a Cohen, complicating her budding relationship with Ryan.


Q. Where is it supposed to be on the show?

    A. Somewhere in Newport Beach.


Q. When did we see it on the show?

    A. Quite a few times in Season two, starting with Episode 5, "The SnO.C."

    But most memorably, in Episode 6, "The Chrismukkah That Almost Wasn't", where the Cohens trim Lindsay's house with Christmas lights to cheer her up.


Q. What is it actually in real life?

    A. An actual home in a residential neighborhood.


Q. Where can I find it in real life?

    A. In Long Beach, California. The Bluff Park area of Long Beach, to be exact. The address is 334 Carroll Park East, just north of Long Beach's main coastline route, Ocean Blvd.

    Here is a map link to the exact location.

    The house is just a few blocks north of another "O.C." location, The Mermaid Inn, which in turn sits just above the stretch of beach where Marissa and Summer met the cast of "The Valley". All of which are a few miles southeast of Shoreline Village, yet another "O.C." location. (It's also very close to the "Joan of Arcadia" house.)

    If you choose to drive past the house, be careful how you drive. Carroll Park East is a very narrow street, and when there are cars parked at the curbs (as there were when I visited), it is virtually impossible for two cars to pass each other. Go slow.

    (I shot the photo below in 2006.)

    [ Warning: This is a private home. Do not trespass on their property,
    knock on their door, or do anything else that might disturb the residents!
    ]


Q. How the heck did you figure out where it was?

    A. This is where my previous location experience came in. As the creator of Seeing-Stars.com, I have a section on that site that lists locations for many movies and TV shows.

    In 2005, I tracked down the location of the house seen in the TV show the "Joan of Arcadia" as the Girardi family home. It was a Craftsman bungalow located in the Bluff Park area of Long Beach. I had also tracked down the "Buffy the Vampire" house, which was located in the city of Torrance, in a neighborhood of older homes with many bungalows mixed in.

    When I saw Lindsay's house, I immediately guessed that it was probably in one of those two neighborhoods. I was already making plans to scout them, when I got a lucky break which saved me some time. A rare director's commentary on the DVD mentioned that they were in Long Beach when they shot that scene.

    So I took a careful look at the Lindsay house scenes, and noted that the street the house is on was very curvy. When I checked a map of the Bluff Park area, almost all of the streets there were perfectly straight. Only two or three were curvy. The most obvious possibility was Carroll Park, which is an actual oval. When I noted (from the show) that there was another street intersecting at a slant with Lindsay's street, I narrowed it down in my mind to Carroll Park East. By blowing up one image of the house from the show, I was able to make out the house number: 334. (It might have been a fake number, but I didn't think so.) The next day, I drove straight to 334 Carroll Park East, camera in hand, and there was "Lindsay's house", big as life.



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