No joke! OUR ENTIRE SITE WAS EXAMINED AND UPDATED ON APRIL 1, 2011. WE HAVE CORRECTED THE PROBLEMS CAUSED BY THE DEMISE OF OUR WEB SERVER IN JANUARY.
Welcome to 6151 Richmond Street, Home of The Golden Girls!
One of the most beloved TV shows of all time – and winner of eleven Emmy® Awards and four Golden Globe Awards – The Golden Girls follows four friends sharing a Miami, Florida home. The house is owned by widow Blanche Devereaux (Rue McClanahan), who has recently been joined by widow Rose Nylund (Betty White) and divorcee Dorothy Zbornak (Bea Arthur). Both had responded to a room-for-rent ad on the bulletin board of a local supermarket. The three were later joined by Dorothy's mother, Sophia Petrillo (Estelle Getty), when Sophia's retirement home, Shady Pines, burned down. Their uproarious relationships with each other and with the comical men in their lives have made them hugely popular with fans of all ages.
An immediate run-away hit, The Golden Girls became a staple of NBC's Must See TV on Saturday nights. The show was the anchor of the Saturday line-up, and routinely won its time slot, as the other networks tried to find shows to compete against it. The Golden Girls was part of a series of shows that revitalized NBC's ratings slump in the 1980s, along with The Cosby Show and LA Law.
After six consecutive seasons in the top 10, and a seventh season at #30, The Golden Girls came to an end when Bea Arthur decided it was time to move on. After the original series ended, White, McClanahan, and Getty reprised their characters in the CBS series The Golden Palace, which ran from September 1992 to May 1993. The show never approached the popularity or acclaim of the original, and ranked 57th in the annual ratings. Reportedly a second season was greenlighted before being canceled the day before the fall schedule was announced.
A 1987 episode of The Golden Girls titled "Empty Nests," featured guest stars Paul Dooley and Rita Moreno as George and Renee Corliss, a married couple living next door to the Golden Girls and facing empty nest syndrome after their three adult daughters had moved out. The episode was intended to launch a spin-off series, but viewer response to the characters was not favorable, and the new show's premise was re-tooled.
The following year Empty Nest debuted, starring Richard Mulligan as pediatrician Harry Weston, a widower whose two adult daughters had moved back home. Characters from both shows made occasional guest appearances on the other show. Although Empty Nest did not feature the same characters that had appeared in "Empty Nests," the Westons' home was the same one used in the original episode.
In 1991, Empty Nest launched its own spin-off, Nurses, set in the same hospital where Dr. Weston worked. As one of the few times in television history that three shows from the same producer, set in the same city, aired back-to-back-to-back on a single network in the same night, the three shows occasionally took advantage of their unique circumstances to create storylines that carried through all three series, such as "Hurricane Saturday". This was one of the major factors in the popularity of fictional crossovers as a television plot device in the 1990s and is still in use today.
When The Golden Palace ended, Getty joined the cast of Empty Nest, making frequent appearances as Sophia in the show's final years.
The Golden Girls earned an incredible eleven Emmy® Awards and four Golden Globe Awards. The Emmy® Awards included three straight Outstanding Comedy Series wins (1986-1988), Outstanding Lead Actress Comedy wins (Betty White 1986, Rue McClanahan 1987, Beatrice Arthur 1988), Outstanding Supporting Actress Comedy (Estelle Getty, 1988), and Best Writing Comedy (1986). The show won the Golden Globe Award for Best TV Series - Comedy three straight times (1986-1988), and Estelle Getty also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Comedy in 1986. The Golden Girls, along with All in the Family and Will & Grace, is one of the few shows where all the principal actors have won Emmy® Awards.
The Golden Girls House
The house's address was mentioned as 6151 Richmond Street in Miami, though no such street or address exists in that city.
The exterior of the house in the series was part of the Backlot Studio Tour attraction at Disney's Hollywood Studios. This façade — along with the Empty Nest house — was among those destroyed in Summer 2003 as Disney bulldozed the homes of "Residential Street" to make room for its Lights, Motors, Action! attraction. The façade was based on a real home at 245 N. Saltair Avenue in Los Angeles, California. The real house was seen in the first season's exterior shots. After that the model was built at Walt Disney World.
The layout of the interior of the house, obviously a soundstage, does not make any spatial sense. The narrow, diagonal hallway leading to the characters' bedrooms was far too close in angle to the space of the kitchen and the garage to contain rooms anywhere near the size of those shown in bedroom scenes. During the pilot episode, Blanche's bedroom was accessed through the large opening at the front of the house, later deemed the entrance to the "lanai" patio. The doors down the hallway led to different Girls' bedrooms, depending on the specific episode as well, though Blanche's bedroom was always the last door at the end of the hall. Rose's room seems to be on the left side of the hall because the door is on the right side of the room, however she often enters or exits through a door on the right side of the hall.
The house's kitchen was recycled from the short-lived Susan Harris series It Takes Two, which ran in 1982-83. After the first few episodes in season one, the polka dot wallpaper of the original kitchen was replaced with a leafy pattern, deemed to be more "tropical" in appearance. The wall directly inside the kitchen, adjacent to the door to the living room, was also shortened during the wallpaper makeover.
At some times the house only has two bathrooms: one common bathroom adjacent to the hallway, and one directly adjacent to Blanche's bedroom, which does not have a bathtub. Then at other times the girls all have their own private bathrooms directly adjacent to their bedrooms.
