Nowadays, ‘Odd Couple’ Would Have to Be Rich Couple, Too

“The Odd Couple,” a beloved sitcom that ran for five years beginning in 1970, just lost its other half. Jack Klugman, the cleanliness-challenged sportswriter Oscar Madison, died at age 90 on Monday, never again to infuriate his fictional and anal-retentive roommate, a photographer named Felix Unger, played by Tony Randall, who died in 2004.

The television show’s premise revolved around how the two men, split from their wives and with diametrically opposed personal habits, cohabited in a Manhattan apartment. But where exactly that apartment, so central to the thrust of the show, was located is ambiguous.

Much like the inconsistent narrative of how the two grudging friends met (early episodes said they were childhood friends, while later episodes suggested they had met during jury duty, among other places) the apartment seemed to bounce between locations.

At various times it was on the Upper West Side, where some episodes seemed to indicate that the pair drove each other crazy amid the twin spires of the exclusive San Remo on Central Park West between 74th and 75th Streets. But exterior shots of their home often were across Central Park, at 1049 Park Avenue, a 14-story co-op of red brick with white detailing.

Neighbors around that building say a familiar sight during the show’s heyday was of pairs of friends asking people to take their photograph in front of the awning at 1049 Park, between 86th and 87th Streets.

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But whether they were compulsively neat or incurably sloppy, it may seem unlikely today that two divorced men, a journalist and a photographer, could afford to harangue each other there today.

At 1049 Park Avenue, the most recent apartment to sell, a three-bedroom, went for just under $4 million, and in the San Remo, a three-bedroom sold this year for nearly four times that amount. Even if the two men were renters, it would seem a stretch. In November, a San Remo four-bedroom with more than six bathrooms rented for almost $30,000 a month, according to the listings database Street Easy.

In fact, most of the series was shot in Paramount Pictures’ studios in Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, doormen in the neighborhood of 1049 Park say passers-by still remark on the building’s star turn, even if the characters of Madison and Unger never — perhaps even fictionally — lived there.

Across the street at 1050 Park Avenue, however, there is, as chance would have it, a resident named Mr. Unger. Carl Unger, 55, that building’s longtime superintendent, lives on the top floor.

“People probably associate me more with the Klugman character, the cigar-chomping grump,” Mr. Unger said. They would be wrong. “I’d be the neat freak, I’d be the Felix Unger,” he said.

But, Mr. Unger added, he does not plan on taking in a roommate anytime soon.