Making an Archie Bunker Pilgrimage

By Stephen M. Silverman

06/25/2001 at 03:56 PM EDT

Making an Archie Bunker Pilgrimage For the past 30 years, Queens, N.Y. resident Dorothy Brandow, 89, has tolerated visitors who stop and photograph the outside of her house, reports The New York Times. That's because its façade -- at 89-70 Cooper Avenue -- was used as the Bunker home on the groundbreaking and much-loved 1971-79 sitcom "All in the Family." But since the show's star, Carroll O'Connor, died of a heart attack last Thursday at the age of 76, the crowd of admirers has expanded, showing up en masse. Brandow, who's lived in the house since her parents bought it in 1924, tries to keep people from coming inside. Besides, her living room looks nothing like the Bunkers's. "I tell them it was a set," she told The Times. "It's a set made in Hollywood." Just as interesting is the fact that Archie Bunker, who was a bigot, would have a hard time recognizing its old neighborhood today. Gone is the white working class constituency that Archie so embraced. It has been replaced by a population that is mostly black, Hispanic and Asian.