Home Alone 2: Lost In New York | 1992
- DIRECTOR |
- Chris Columbus
Once again, young Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) gets separated from his kith and kin at Christmas – this time as the family heads off to Florida and he catches a plane to New York.
The house at 671 Lincoln Avenue in Winnetka and Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport reprise their roles from the first movie.
Once in New York, the ever-resourceful Kevin somehow contrives to stay in luxury at the Plaza Hotel, Fifth Avenue at 59th Street. A regular fixture in New York-set movies, the Plaza is heavily featured in the original 1981 Arthur, as well as Hitchcock’s classic North By Northwest.
But this is a John Hughes production, and if it can be shot in Chicago, it will be. So although there are some scenes indisputably filmed in the Big Apple (including Central Park, the Wollman Skating Rink and the Rockefeller Center), there’s quite a lot of Chicago too.
The frontage of ‘Duncan’s Toy Chest’, the store run by Mr Duncan (Eddie Bracken), is Chicago’s famous Rookery Building, 202 South La Salle Street at West Adams Street. Recognise is as the HQ of Eliot Ness in Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables?
The interior of the store is the Uptown Theater, 4816 North Broadway. Dating from 1925, the Uptown is the largest theatre in Chicago – and possibly even the US – though it’s been closed since 1981. Its vast space was also used for Ron Howard’s Backdraft, and you might also recognise the exterior as the abandoned 'Texas' movie house where Mark Wahlberg discovers the old truck in Transformers: Age Of Extinction.
The luxury suite, in which the family is reunited at the end of the film, is the Conrad Hilton Suite of the Chicago Hilton and Towers, 720 South Michigan Avenue at East Balbo Drive in the South Loop, which is also featured in The Fugitive and My Best Friend’s Wedding.
