I am kind of a savant when it comes to old television theme songs. Mention any show from the ‘70s, ‘80s or ‘90s and I can sing the opening instantly! A Warner Bros. Studio tour guide discovered my superpower once on a trip through the lot and tried his darndest to stump me, to no avail. Growing Pains, Perfect Strangers, Full House, Cheers, Punky Brewster – I knew them all! One he failed to quiz me on, but that I would have been able to belt out all the same was “This Is It,” the catchy opening to One Day at a Time. (Just reading those words puts the chorus right into your head, doesn’t it? Just me?) Even though the series, which aired on CBS from 1975 to 1984, was before my time, I watched it in syndication every day when I got home from grade school. So ingrained in my childhood memories is the show that I can practically smell the steam from my regular afternoon Cup O’Noodles snack every time I catch an episode now. So when my friend Owen informed me that he had found the apartment building where divorced single mom Ann Romano (Bonnie Franklin) lived with her two teenage daughters, Barbara (Valerie Bertinelli) and Julie Cooper (Mackenzie Phillips) – and regularly avoided the amorous advances of handyman Schneider (Pat Harrington Jr.) – on the pivotal series, I had to give it a stalk!
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As was typical of television shows of the era, the apartment building was not shown in establishing shots, but solely in the series’ opening credits, which you can watch here.
Said to be at 1344 Hartford Drive in Indianapolis, Owen located Ann, Julie and Barbara’s complex at 656 South Ridgeley Drive in Los Angeles’ Mid-Wilshire neighborhood. The hunt was a bit of a circuitous one. Of the endeavor, he told me, “My first hunch all along was that the building would be close to where the studio was located or in or around Koreatown, since I saw quite a few apartment buildings that looked similar when doing Google Images searches. Two studio locations were listed on IMDb, so I started looking within a mile or so radius of each, figuring maybe they didn’t venture far from ‘home’ to film the scene. I came up with nada, but while researching the show a bit further I learned that it was originally taped at an address not listed on IMDb and moved shortly after its premiere. Well, with this new address (7800 Beverly Blvd.) in hand, I resumed the search, using 3D satellite views on Google Maps. I checked mostly north of the address and was about to call it quits, but then I was looking southeast of the address and noticed a few apartment buildings that shared characteristics (specifically the arched windows and the partial brick/partial non-brick façade) so I decided to keep at it. I eventually spotted a possibility on Ridgeley, so I went to street view and — after a bit of hesitation — came to the conclusion that I had lucked into finding the right place, less than 1.5 miles from the studio. I wasn’t 100 percent certain at first, but when I saw the third and fourth floors on street view, I thought — to borrow the opening line from a certain ‘70s theme song — this is it.” See, I’m not the only one who knows their theme songs!
Despite the passage of more than four decades, the building still looks much as it did on the show, though a portion of the second-floor brickwork has since been stuccoed over. It is unclear when the change was made, as it pre-dates street view imagery. Schneider must have worked overtime on that job!
The March 1937 Los Angeles Times notification below, which denotes the building as the “Wilshire Ridgeley Apartments,” shows the pre-altered façade, as it appeared on the series.
The handsome 4-story, 32-unit building was erected in 1929.
Only its exterior was featured on One Day at a Time. The interior of apartment #402, was, of course, just a set – built first at CBS Television City, as Owen mentioned, then Metromedia Square (now Helen Bernstein High School), and finally at Universal Studios. Not only did Schneider get around, but so did the show!
One Day at a Time co-creator Allan Mannings told the Indianapolis Star that he chose to set the series there because the city is “large enough to be meaningful, but not so large as to be overwhelming and not so small as to be overlooked.” A quick look at area apartment buildings via Google Images told me the location managers did a fine job selecting the Ridgeley Drive structure as it does very much have a Railroad City feel thanks to its brick façade and arched windows. (In an interesting side-note, Mannings created the series with his wife, the previously married and divorced Whitney Blake, who loosely based the storyline upon her own experiences as a working single mom. She originally hoped her daughter could play Ann, but the pitch got stuck in years of development turnaround and, when One Day at a Time was finally produced, the lead, of course, went to Bonnie Franklin. Don’t you worry about Blake’s daughter, though. Meredith Baxter fared just fine, going on to star as Elyse Keaton on Family Ties, one of the most famous screen moms of all time! And yeah, I know the words to that theme song, too!)
The supposed Logansport home Ann, Barbara and Julie are shown moving away from at the beginning of the One Day at a Time credits is also in Los Angeles. It can be found at 4954 Willow Crest Avenue in North Hollywood, looking much like it did when the segment was shot 45 years ago, as the Google Street View imagery below attests to. (Thanks to Chas, from It’s Filmed There, for the info!)
Though I don’t remember it being so in my childhood viewings, the show was considered groundbreaking. The year it debuted, one newspaper critic, William E. Sarmento, showed his scathing disdain for it by opining, “One Day at a Time is about a newly-divorced mother and her two teenage daughters. It is painfully apparent that at CBS the traditional family is all but extinct except on The Waltons. In fact, I was wondering if enough of us wrote in, maybe the mother on One Day at a Time might not be introduced to Richard Castellano on Joe and Sons. He’s a widower with two sons, and, who knows, together they might make their own hour-long weekly series. The message on CBS seems to be that marriage leads either to an early death or divorce. Maybe they’re right, but I think it would be nice to be reassured every once in a while that the whole country is not going to hell via CBS’s thinking.” Yikes. Audiences didn’t share the same sentiment, though, as One Day at a Time went on to enjoy a nine-year run, turning its four stars into household names and this stalker into a young fan.
Big THANK YOU to my friend Owen for finding this location!
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Until next time, Happy Stalking! 
Stalk It: The One Day at a Time apartment building is located at 656 South Ridgeley Drive in Los Angeles’ Mid-Wilshire neighborhood