Saturday, July 5, 2014

Laura Palmer's House is for Sale

I loved the 1990s. People recycled, music meant something, and you could smoke at Starbucks. But around the time I was practicing five speed on my dad's "Farm Use Only" Ford Ranger, I discovered the most 90s thing of all time: Twin Peaks.

Dated for sure - right down to Audrey's saddle shoes and Laura's hair - the show that had all of America asking "Who Killed Laura Palmer" was decades ahead of its time. In fact, given the uncompromising weirdness that is the show's co-creator, David Lynch, Twin Peaks may have not simply been ahead of it's time, but out of this world.



Now for about $550,000 you can own the house where it all began. Used in the pilot and the prequel film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the Palmer "home" in Everett, WA is for sale

The house is largely unchanged. The pink carpet and dated wallpaper are gone, but the wicker chair where Laura sat to write torrid secrets in her infamous diary remains in its place more than twenty years later.

Considering the notoriety this prime time drama received and the cult following it has since amassed, perhaps a fan will do what Brian Jones did with The Christmas Story house. At more than half a million dollars, it's a little pricy for a movie museum, but I hope the new owners decide to reinstall the ceiling fan that haunted Sarah Palmer's waking nightmares.

Fueled by internet speculation, rumors of David Lynch and Mark Frost revisiting Twin Peaks routinely come and go from time to time. Unfortunately it seems that long time fans of a show that lasted only two short seasons are left with endless questions and disturbing images burned into our minds. Exactly how Lynch wants it.


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David Lynch studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on North Broad Street in the late 1960s. He lived in a house on 13th and Wood, diagonally across from the morgue, now part of Roman High School.

He described Philadelphia as "decaying but...fantastically beautiful, filled with violence, hate and filth," crediting the city for the inspiration to make his first film, Eraserhead. Prior to PAFA's upcoming David Lynch exhibit, he returned to the city in 2012. He said, "I remember when the city was gray and dirty and deteriorated and ugly and a real mess and had real character, and now it’s all bright and shiny just like every other city."

His former neighborhood, dubbed Eraserhood by many, is now an odd mix of pricy lofts, an expanding Chinatown, sprinkled with abandoned warehouses, older row homes, and the defunct Reading Viaduct. 

As plans solidify to convert the viaduct into an elevated park, so does the neighborhood's prominence. But like Laura's wicker chair that still adorns the Palmer residence, David Lynch's soul is still in Philadelphia, a city that evoked nightmares in the modest Montanan, ever present in his haunting works of art.

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