Finally Figured Out...

...the house. For years, I was confused about the building in which Kevin pulled off his antics with the burglars. Seeing as I had never grown up in NYC, or any east-coast city, the architecture was unfamiliar to me. I kept wondering what this place was that Kevin was at.

It wasn't until this year, watching it, that I finally realized that the "house" Kevin had set his traps up in, was basically your average New York City Brownstone. NYC is known for these buildings, basically brick townhouses (I like to think of them as stone and wood boxes) all lined up in a row up and down the older streets and neighborhoods within the city. Most were built in the Victorian and Edwardian Era, so many are over 100-150 years old. Most have a basement, and three floors with access to their flat roofs, which are sometimes treated as a patio, depending on the owner and how much or how little yard space they have down below.

So apparently those relatives we heard about in the first movie, who lived in an apartment in Paris, owned a run-down brownstone in NYC that was just a half-block from Central Park. From what Mrs. McCallister said, the relatives were renovating, which was one reason they were still in Paris a year later, and the house was unoccupied and in a partial state of disrepair, with construction equipment everywhere.

Luckily, this worked to Kevin's advantage when setting traps, but I can see why his relatives would want to renovate the place. It badly needed to be repaired and upgraded.

Trivia: I read that this part of the movie was filmed at a well-used studio backlot that has NYC brownstones set up in a row.