The 9,500-square-foot Minneapolis mansion that served as the home of Mary Richards in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” remains on the market with a steadily falling price.
Moore, the namesake star of the 1970s sitcom, died Wednesday. She was 80.
Built in 1900, the turreted Queen Anne Victorian, with seven bedrooms and nine bathrooms, is located at 2104 Kenwood Parkway between Cedar Lake and Lake of the Isles.
The home in the tony Kenwood neighborhood was most recently listed for sale on June 14, 2012, for $2.895 million. The price has dropped since then in a series of five reductions and is now listed for $1.695 million.
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The house was featured in the opening credits of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” While Moore’s Mary Richards character was depicted as living in the home’s third-floor apartment, in reality it was a single-family home at the time.
Still, the windows of the real home’s third floor roughly match the windows in the pretend studio apartment occupied by Richards, an associate producer at the fictional WJM-TV in Minneapolis.
The house, which occupies a 0.35-acre lot, was formerly owned by a director of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. According to public records, it was sold for $1.105 million in 2005 and then renovated by a contractor. The current owners purchased the home at the height of the real-estate market in 2007 for $2.895 million.
An out-of-state job opportunity was the reason the home was put on the market in 2012, according to broker Barry Berg.
The house still draws curious fans of the hit show, which aired from 1970 to 1977 and brought fame to Minneapolis. (For the last two seasons of the show, Richards lived in a high-rise apartment — shown as the 1970s-era Cedar Square West complex in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood — after the then-owner of the Kenwood house, tired of the endless stream of gawkers, objected to its continued use by the producers. An “Impeach Nixon” banner was even hung on the house’s exterior.)
In 1996, Moore herself visited the house while she was in town to promote her biography with a book signing at the Mall of America.
In real life, Moore and her longtime physician husband, Robert Levine, lived in a stately mansion on two adjacent parcels of nearly 6.5 acres in ultra-wealthy Greenwich, Conn. According to Variety, property records indicate the property was acquired in two separate 2006 transactions that totaled $10.25 million.
