Backstory: A holiday fantasy tourists can touch

One recent Saturday morning in South Tremont, a neighborhood of narrow streets overlooking a steel plant, 11-year-old Drake Przybylski ladles chocolate Ovaltine from an 18-quart roaster into plastic cups.

It's not exactly the lemonade stand he always wanted. But he's not complaining.

"The first weekend I made over $150!" he says from the front porch of his next-door neighbor – the recently restored house featured in "A Christmas Story," which was recently ranked by a Harris poll in the top three most popular holiday movies. For the third time since the house opened to the public Nov. 25, Drake has donned the coonskin hat of yellow-eyed bully Scut Farkus and sold the movie's official drink to visitors.

Parents in their 30s and 40s bring their children. Children in their teens and 20s bring their parents. They wear movie sweatshirts, wield camcorders, and promise donations. They wait in line for tickets and pose with Drake's Red Ryder BB gun in front of the leg lamp in the picture window.

For the most part, the visitors look like middle- and upper-class American families, the ones who, for decades, have been fleeing Cleveland, named the poorest big city in 2005. But this centenarian structure with the green trim has brought them back to one of its neighborhoods – in droves. About 200 people a day show up during the week, between 1,100 and 1,500 a day on weekends. By Saturday, 20,200 had traipsed through the house – and many more are expected this week.

With his props and stories – including the one about finding a BB from the movie in the back yard – Drake definitely adds to the charm. He wears glasses like Ralphie and pulls funny-guy stunts like Flick. He hasn't shot his eye out with his BB gun, though he did shoot himself in the knee once.

Drake wants to be a chef when he grows up and figured he'd start with a lemonade stand. But until his next-door neighbor became a major tourist attraction, the stand seemed like a bad, money-losing idea to his mom. For most of the past seven years, they've seen little traffic on their stretch of West 11th Street, where many homes look abandoned. Drake's dad, a police officer, bought their house seven years ago at a reduced price under the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's Officer Next Door program. Two drug-dealer neighbors left around the time they arrived.

The house was chosen for the 1983 movie because its working-class exterior evoked 1940s Hammond, Ind., an industrial town where the original book's author, Jean Shepherd, grew up. (The film crew even had the steel mills melt tires to blacken the smoke rising in the background to make it look more dramatic.) This would be home to the movie version of Shepherd's middle-class family: Ralphie, the fantasy-inclined 9-year-old Red Ryder fanatic; Randy, his kid brother who doesn't like to eat; Mr. Parker, whose most entertaining lines are delivered to a furnace, and Mrs. Parker, who fills her kids' mouths with cooked cabbage when they're good, and soap when they're not.

The snow in the movie conceals much of the decline along "Cleveland Street," but retiree Jim Moralevitz remembers the 1980s as being a decade of renters neglecting their yards, rough neighbors, and drug activity.

"My own family said 'It's getting dangerous. When are you going to leave?'" he says. "But I didn't want to leave. It was my parents' home. I just kept fixing it up."

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