Matthew Broderick and John Hughes chose 370 Beech Street for Ferrari crash
matthew broderick’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off got its Ferrari crash scene from a house at 370 Beech Street in Highland Park, after John Hughes and his crew found the Rose House during location scouting. The choice replaced an early plan to stage the car’s escape by a Lake Michigan home and sent the production in a different direction.
370 Beech Street in Highland Park
The house is a mid-century modern structure designed by A. James Speyer, with a pavilion added in 1974 that later served as the garage. That setup gave the sequence a place to land once the crew moved past the idea of a lakefront home for Cameron Frye’s family.
Bill Coker, the unit production manager, said the crew spent long days driving around the North Shore with nine department heads crammed inside a passenger van. The search was still focused on finding a home on the lake, until the van reached a bridge in Highland Park and Coker noticed a steel I-beam and glass building cantilevered off a cliff and arroyo.
Bill Coker on the scout
“We were spending all of our location-scouting time trying to find a house on a cliff on the shore of the lake,” Coker said. He added, “I saw this steel I-beam and glass building almost completely cantilevered off of this cliff and this arroyo, and I said, ‘Wow, look at that building. It’d be crazy if the car went out one of those windows and into that forest.’”
Tom Jacobson remembered Hughes reacting immediately when the van stopped. “Whoa, what’s that?” Hughes said, according to Jacobson. He also recalled Hughes looking at the house and saying, “That’s really cool, that looks like a Mies van der Rohe.”
John Hughes in 1999
By 1999, Hughes was still describing the scene as a tight character beat built around Cameron and the Ferrari his father owned in the film. He said, “He puts his foot down, then backs off.” He also said, “I like playing this with the headrest in focus, and him in the background having a tantrum.”
The location choice gave the crash sequence a real architectural frame instead of the lakefront setup the crew had first imagined. For viewers revisiting the film, 370 Beech Street is the practical answer to where the sequence came from, and the scouting story shows how fast a production can pivot when the right site appears in front of it.
