Latest posts
High Line (Succession / I Am Legend)
You’re standing on a railroad that refused to die — thirty feet above the street, walking tracks that once fed the Meatpacking District and, before the park existed, starred in a zombie apocalypse. The Scene Long before tourists and gelato carts, the High Line was a rusting elevated rail line — exactly what I Am…
Museum of the Moving Image
The best film location in Queens is a building that shows you how film locations are made. The Museum of the Moving Image sits inside one of the original 1920 buildings of the Kaufman Astoria Studios complex — Paramount’s old eastern studio, where the Marx Brothers shot their first talkies — and it’s the rare…
30 Rock
Here’s the best joke 30 Rock ever told: the show named after 30 Rockefeller Plaza wasn’t filmed there. Tina Fey’s 30 Rock (2006–2013) — seven seasons, 138 episodes, and a shelf of Emmys — shot at Silvercup Studios in Long Island City, miles from the address in its title. But the building needs no sitcom…
Steiner Studios
Full disclosure, hunter: the old version of this post was describing a completely different studio. Everything it said — the 1920 build, Paramount’s original home, Sesame Street, the landmark status, the white gate on 35th Avenue — belongs to Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens. This is the correction, and it’s a good story on its…
Kaufman Astoria Studios
If Steiner Studios is New York’s modern studio city, Kaufman Astoria is its founding myth. This is where it started: the eastern home of Paramount Pictures, opened in 1920 when the movies belonged to New York, later an Army film factory, then the rescued landmark behind Sesame Street, Goodfellas, and Orange Is the New Black.…
NBC Studios
Some studios you visit. This one you ride — on cables. Deep inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza sits Studio 8H, the home of Saturday Night Live, and it is literally floating: the studio’s walls, floor, and ceiling were built as assemblies suspended on heavy steel cables and springs, insulated from the building’s frame so the rumble…
Tom’s Restaurant (Seinfeld)
Every TV fan on Earth knows this corner, even if they’ve never been to New York. You know the shot: the red-and-blue neon wrapping around the building, the slap-bass kicking in, and Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer sliding into a booth to argue about nothing. Welcome to Tom’s Restaurant — the real-life face of the…
“BAD” Michael Jackson
One of the most famous dance sequences in history happened underground — and you can still ride the train to the exact spot. In the winter of 1986, Martin Scorsese rolled cameras inside Brooklyn’s Hoyt–Schermerhorn station, and Michael Jackson turned a working subway into a stage. This hunt takes you underground to stand where the…
The Friends Apartment building
You know this building even if you’ve never seen Friends. The six-story walk-up on a West Village corner, fire escapes climbing its facade, green shutters framing the windows — it appeared in the establishing shots before nearly every episode of the most beloved sitcom of the ’90s. Millions of travelers have stood here, and every…
Spook Central (55 Central Park West)
Forget everything you know about apartment hunting. When the Ghostbusters location scouts needed a building that could plausibly serve as a lightning rod for the apocalypse, they picked this handsome Art Deco co-op on Central Park West — and more than forty years later, fans still gather on its sidewalk, tilting their heads back at…
