where is Brewster place?

It's been a long time since I've read the book but I don't believe an exact location was given. I think all is known is that BP is set in an urban industrial city up North. I think the idea is that Brewster Place exists in many cities. I always imagined it was somewhere like NYC or Philly or midwest like Chicago or Detroit, though.

It's definitely not New York. Maybe Chicago.

I read the book and have scene the movie a bunch of times and it's never mentioned.

The best guess is Detroit or Philly. Lynn Whitfield went to NY. But also Jackee and Oprah's characters discussed a number of places Jackee had been. I didn't take her character for one that backtracks through cities. She'd been to NY, st. Lois and Chicago, It's northern industrial so that where i gather they are.

definitely midwest or east coast. but where?

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I always felt like Brewster Place was in Washington DC or Baltimore. I decided this after Etta Mae talked about all the places she's been.

Philadelphia is a good guess as well.

Whenever I watch this movie, I ask myself this same question. I just try to go by clues and the best clue I found was when Lynn Whitfield's character jumped out of the window in her PJs, half dead and out of her mind with grief, she said that she just kept driving until she couldn't go anymore and wound up in NYC. If you go by real life logic, as sick as she was she probably wouldn't have made it down the street so I think it's safe to say that it's not too far away, especially since she hadn't eaten in a week or so. By not too far, I mean not a day's drive. By the way she said it, it was obvious that she wasn't planning to drive all the way to NYC, like she did it on autopilot and just drove, not even thinking about where she was headed and snapped out of it when she ran out of gas, which tells me that BP is close enough to NYC to drive there without having to stop for gas. That leads me to believe that BP is most likely somewhere on the east coast. Then she said that she couldn't swim or fly so she stayed, which I took to mean that she didn't have any money to get back but I also took it to mean that BP was at least a plane ride away from NYC. Also, earlier in the movie, Etta left whatever city that BP was in and headed for Harlem. When she asked Mattie to come with, Mattie's excuse was that she didn't want to uproot that brat of hers to follow Etta, which further leads me to believe that NYC was at least a couple of hours away. Otherwise Mattie would have had another excuse or she probably would have gone, especially since she ended up moving out of her rat infested apartment, anyway, soon after. Etta also had traveled from Chicago and St Louis before she got to the city so it wasn't either of those but with her having a thing for big cities that was "the place to be" for blacks, that says that it must be in a major city and not in some small sleepy town and likely not in the south. It's not Maine, because that's where Gene said he was headed and it's not New Port because that's also were Gene lied and said that he was headed. Detroit would be too far to drive on one tank of gas, even in an old car so my best guess would be either Cleveland or Washington D.C. My bet is on D.C. Plus BP, bares a striking resemblance to Sesame Street and 227 so yeah, I'm going to go with D.C. That is if we were talking about an actual nonfictional place.

Another thing that I've always wondered is what decade is this suppose to be? Any guesses?



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