The iconic wooden staircase appears in both the 1994 PBS miniseries and in the trailer for Netflix's revival.īy comparison, here's how 28 Barbary Lane is described in the stories: The house was on Barbary Lane, a narrow, wooded walk-way off Leavenworth between Union and Filbert. 'The quiet and ivy covered pathway extends two blocks east-west between Leavenworth and Taylor, paralleling Union and Green.' The Leavenworth Street end of the lane features a wooden arch as its entryway, while the other side descends down a set of wooden steps that spills out onto Taylor Street. 'Macondray Lane is a small pedestrian lane on the south-eastern side of Russian Hill,' SF Weekly notes.

According SF Weekly, the real Barbary Lane is actually a two-block pedestrian lane called Macondray Lane. In the novels, the apartment complex is an old boardinghouse run by a transgender landlady named Anna Madrigal. 28 Barbary Lane, then, became a safe haven for Tales of the City's characters to return to, giving the story both grit and warmth. That meant telling a sudsy but authentic tale of queer life just a few years after the modern queer liberation movement began, and in one of the epicenters of queer living. Maupin began writing Tales of the City in San Francisco in the late '70s, with his characters living in the same place and time. But Netflix takes on the beloved classic with more queer creatives behind the scenes and in front of the camera than ever before. Earlier adaptations were produced in 1994, 1998, and 2001 by PBS and later Showtime in conjunction with Channel 4. Tales of the City is something of a gay cat with nine lives, returning this summer for a fourth limited series adaption. The address is entirely fictional, but both the Netflix version of the series and its earlier television adaptations are fashioned to resemble the real place off of which Maupin based 28 Barbary Lane.

But newcomers to the story may be wondering if the house in Tales of the City is real. Based on the serialized newspaper columns-turned-novels of Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City tells the story of a group of fictional characters living at 28 Barbary Lane in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco.

28 barbary lane