Chicago
Every other movie in this field-guide series needed real geography. Ferris Bueller needed nine locations across the city. Home Alone needed two houses and two churches. Sixteen Candles needed three suburbs. The Breakfast Club needed one gym. The entire film takes place inside a single Des Plaines high school — a school that had already been closed for three years by the time cameras rolled, and today isn't a school at all.
Maine North High School, Des Plaines: Now an Illinois State Police Headquarters
Maine North High School opened in 1970 and closed for good in May 1981. Three years later, John Hughes's production moved into the empty building and shot the entire movie there in the spring of 1984 — the exterior, the hallways, and the library itself, which the crew built inside the school's old gymnasium. There was no separate "library location" to go find; it was a set, built on a basketball court, inside a high school that had already stopped being one.
The building didn't sit empty afterward. The same street address, 9511 Harrison Street, is listed today as the Des Plaines headquarters of Illinois State Police Troop 3. We didn't find a single source that spells out "the old high school became the police station" in so many words — but the address match across multiple independent listings is about as close to confirmed as this gets without a dedicated local-history piece neither of us has found yet. If that's right, Vice Principal Vernon's old school now runs background checks for a living.
The Football Field Myth, Settled in 2015
For decades, fans argued over where the movie's closing fist-pump scene on the football field was actually shot — one camp said Park Ridge, another said the field belonged to Maine North itself. The debate had a real ending: in a 2015 interview, the film's own cinematographer, Thomas Del Ruth, told the Chicago Tribune it was Maine North's practice field all along — the same campus as everything else in the movie, not a second real location. That field has since been demolished.
Every other movie in this series needed the whole North Shore. This one needed a gym, a library set, and a Saturday.
What We're Not Pinning
A few secondary sources credit Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook — 2300 Shermer Road — for some of this film's interior shots, including one listing on IMDb. We're not putting a second pin down for it. It directly conflicts with the better-sourced account above (an on-record interview with the film's own cinematographer, not a fan listing), and Glenbrook North is already a real, independently-verified location in our own Ferris Bueller's Day Off guide — a different, later Hughes movie that's also fictionally set at "Shermer High School." Our best guess is that's exactly where the mix-up comes from: two different movies sharing one fictional school name, misread as one shared real building. Same standard as every field guide on this site: a location goes on the map once it clears a real, independent source, not before.
Written First, Filmed Second: The Real Story Behind Which Movie Came First
The Breakfast Club is usually filed as the second movie in Hughes's directorial run, after Sixteen Candles. The writing order was actually the other way around. By several accounts, Hughes had the idea for The Breakfast Club as early as 1982 — reportedly under the working title "The Lunch Bunch" — well before Sixteen Candles existed. He wrote the Sixteen Candles script over a single Fourth of July weekend in 1983, and because that script was finished first, Universal greenlit it as his directorial debut instead. The Breakfast Club wasn't shot until the following spring, and didn't reach theaters until February 1985, nine months after Sixteen Candles. Molly Ringwald told largely the same version of the story at a 2025 panel: Hughes meant to make The Breakfast Club first, and the studio bumped the other script ahead of it once it was done.
The in-story setting is specific, too: a single Saturday, March 24, 1984, in detention at the fictional Shermer High School, under Vice Principal Richard Vernon. The five students — played by Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, and Ally Sheedy, the five actors who'd go on to get labeled the "Brat Pack" partly because of this movie — are the entire cast list that matters. There's no one else to track down a real location for, because almost no one else leaves that library.
The Completionist Checklist
For anyone tracing this one in person: there's exactly one real stop. The former Maine North High School campus in Des Plaines — now, as far as the public record lines up, Illinois State Police Troop 3's own headquarters, at the same street address the school used. The gym where the library set was built is inside that same building. The football field the production actually used, confirmed by its own cinematographer in 2015, sat on the same campus and is gone now. That's the whole list.
That's the real tour, such as it is: one closed school, one police station, and a fictional Saturday detention that took longer to get greenlit than the movie that beat it to theaters.
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