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As technology has expanded to where everyone holds a small computer in their hands, so has the scope of war. War is no longer between armies carrying various weapons, war is now online. Soldiers are no longer defined by camouflage or nation’s flag, but can be anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Hackers, for the most part, have not been shown realistically on TV. They type at speeds that would make Road Runner catch whiplash and their skills are treated more like magic, because audiences aren’t expected to understand hacker culture. Sam Esmail, creator of the USA cyber-drama Mr. Robot set in New York City knows that, so he wanted to make something more authentic.
Here are filming locations featured in Mr. Robot since season 1 starting with the most recent episodes in season 3. For season 2 locations, jump forward here. For season 1 locations, jump forward here.
It’s the last season of Mr. Robot. Things are not opening well, with Angela at the estate of Philip Price, who is trying to get her to relent against Whiterose. He finally reveals that she’s his daughter but things don’t go well. This is filmed at Mill Neck Manor, a Gilded Age Long Island estate on the Long Island Sound that now operates as the Mill Neck Manor School for the Deaf.
Photo: Elizabeth Fisher/USA Network
Mr. Robot asks pedophile lawyer Freddy Lomax to meet him in Grand Central Terminal with a copy of his email inbox on a USB drive. He gets out in a yellow cab at the corner of 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue, enters the terminal, and heads to the main information kiosk in the atrium. The scene was recorded when half of the departures sign were replaced with digital screens. Mr Robot directs Lomax to the Metro North train to Brewster, where Elliott is waiting.
1150 Grand Concourse, one of the many apartments in the Bronx with very unique entrances, located just two blocks from the Bronx Museum. The mosaic fish design certainly stands standout, even beneath the scaffolding that was there for the filming. An additional plaque noting that the buildings belongs to E Corp Properties was added. A scene is also filmed inside the playfully designed Art Moderne lobby.
Photo: Elizabeth Fisher/USA Network
Darlene takes Elliot on trip to see what the safe deposit box of their recently deceased mother might contain. The Bowery subway station has appeared in Mr. Robot before, filmed in the abandoned lower level station, but this time the scene is filmed in the Church Avenue station in Brooklyn. You can see CHURCH in the tiles on the background wall, and the station signage hanging has been added — it doesn’t have quite the same design language as a normal MTA sign.
The Church Avenue station has also recently appeared as a filming location in Joker.
Photo by Elizabeth Fisher/USA Network
The locations set in Beijing – which include the home of Chinese Minister of State Security, Minister Zhang– and the initial meeting place between Zhang and the FBI – are mostly shot at the Alder Manor in Yonkers, just north of New York City. Minister Zhang, played by B.D. Wong, is also Whiterose, the character’s other female persona, whom we saw in the first season when she meets with Elliot in a computer repair shop near Rockefeller Center. That center later gets destroyed in a fire.
We’ve been to an event at the Alder Manor, a stunning location that includes an empty pool in the mansion and abandoned school buildings, which was not show in the show. The mansion was once belonged to Gilded Age tycoon W.B. Thompson and later become a catholic high school and junior college.
Photo: Elizabeth Fisher/USA Network
In the third episode, Elliot and Mr. Robot run into Elliot’s former therapist, Krista in front of Butterfield Market, a real supermarket on the Upper East Side. She’s there with her boyfriend and is not comfortable seeing Elliot. This location becomes a key spot in episode six when Elliot Villar sends his goons to track her.
Photo: Scott McDermott/USA Network
Elliot heads to one of his favorite coffee shops, which was Ron’s Coffee in the first season and Tod’s Coffee in this final season. In both seasons, the coffee shop was shot in Think Coffee on 4th Avenue between 12th and 13th Street just south of Union Square.
In season three of Mr. Robot, Elliot literally wakes up to a new reality, discovering that the F Society takedown he orchestrated merely made citizens “docile enough for their slaughtering.” The show weighs in on the current political climate, connecting a fictional story to contemporary events.
“They packaged a fight into a product,” Elliot says in a monologue in the first episode of season three which is punctured with footage of Donald Trump, “turned our dissent into intellectual property. Televising our revolution with commercial breaks. They backdoored into our minds and robbed our truth, refurbished the facts and marked up the price. This is what they do. It’s what they’re good at. It’s their greatest trick. Lobotomizing us into their virtual reality show…And this all started because I tried to hide from society, remember? Yeah, well I f***d society all right, I reset it to zero and if I don’t do anything about it, it’ll continue to grow in this malignant way. And that’s what I’m afraid of most. This dark future I’ve set into motion. Who knows what could come from this?” Elliot realizes, he is to blame. This season will be about what Elliot does with this guilt.
Picking up after the season 2 finale cliffhanger, Elliot, who has been shot by Tyrell Wellick is taken to an apartment to recuperate following surgery. Angela is there, under instructions by the Dark Army to look after him. When Elliot realizes what is going on, he hobbles back to his apartment and finds Darlene there, who we assume is now an informant for the FBI.
Elliot needs to get access to the internet so Darlene takes him to a two level, loft hacker space. The exterior of the hacker space is shot on Cortlandt Alley, a popular film location in Chinatown/Tribeca seen in shows like Gotham and much more. This particular stretch of Cortlandt Alley is between White and Warren Street.
When Darlene and Elliot leave the hackerspace, they emerge from the building at 70 White Street, at the corner of Cortlandt Alley.
In season two, Tyrell Wellick resurfaces, ready to implement phase two Elliot (Mr. Robot’s rather) agenda. They end up in a raw loft that overlooks the AT&T Long Lines Building in Tribeca at 33 Thomas Street, a telephone exchange building. It is here that all the paper documents of ECorp are being sent and which Elliot wants to destroy in one swoop. We see this again in season three, as the real scenario plays out to the audience with Mr. Robot’s involvement, thus explaining Elliot’s confusion in season two.
Turns out Angela has been brainwashed or convinced by Whiterose’s vision of the future and is helping the Dark Army “manage” Elliot and Mr. Robot. Angela and Mr. Robot ride a New York City public bus as she reveals this plot twist, and we see an aerial shot of it going uptown on Park Avenue as the electricity goes back on. Eventually we see midtown and 432 Park Avenue skyscraper light up.
Joanna Wellick convinces the bartender she’s been sleeping with to testify that E Corp CTO Scott Knowles killed his own wife as retaliation against Scott beating her. The bartender, upon realizing that Joanna was doing it to remove the suspicion from Tyrell, retaliates and shoots Joanna and her bodyguard on Front Street in Manhattan, just next to the Brooklyn Bridge. On the left side of the street in the shot, you can see the distinctive windows of the 254 Front Street condos and in front, the on ramp of the bridge.
Coney Island (and the Wonder Wheel and Thunderbolt Rollercoaster) is a pivotal location throughout all seasons of Mr. Robot, from the location of F Society to where Tyrell meets Mr. Robot, to where Elliot and Mr. Robot chat on the boardwalk and we see Elliot fall off the rail. In the third season, Darlene meets Elliot here who has cut off contact, believing her to be a trigger for the re-emergence of Mr. Robot.
FBI agent DiPierro is seen entering an FBI safe house that’s located on Manhattan Avenue near the corner of Powers Street in Williamsburg, a typical shingle-style house of the neighborhood. It is located across from an abandoned lot.
The CEO of ECorp, Philip Price, makes a speech at the G20 Summit. This scene, with the large auditorium, is filmed at the Lehman Center for Performing Arts, on the Lehman College campus in the Bronx. Whiterose/Zhang is in the audience and is not pleased withe Price’s speech.
In a flashback, we see Darlene meet with Cisco at FDR Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island to hand him the femtocell, which eventually Angela will plant at ECorp. Cisco hands it to Irving, the Dark Army fixer who is keeping the watch on Tyrell up in the countryside.
Following the weeks out in the countryside, Irving brings Tyrell to the supposed Funan Hotel near the intersection of 8th Avenue and 25th Street. We know this intersection from earlier in this season when Elliott (as himself, vs. Mr. Robot) meets Tyrell in the yellow cab that brings them to the AT&T Long Lines Building where the ECorp paper records are being consolidated to.
The hotel film location is actually the apartment building The Seymour at 261 W 25th Street.
In the opening of season 2, we see that Elliot has moved in with his mom in a sparsely decorated townhouse. He tells us that he is sticking to a strict routine hoping that his father, Mr. Robot, will disappear from his illusions. This routine which includes eating his meals with his friend Leon at the Extreme Diner. The real diner this is filmed in, both interior and exterior is the Paphos Diner at Broadway Junction on the eastern side of Bedford-Stuyvesant, on the border of East New York. In the show, the exterior has been repainted “Extreme Diner.”
There is a fan theory that Elliot is actually in prison and that he’s creating this illusion for himself. Numerous details seem to make sense, most curiously the red phone in his mom’s house that we noted – check it out here.
The CTO of E. Corp volunteers to deliver the $5.9 million ransom the hackers (led by Darlene) are asking for, to be delivered in Battery Park. In the scene, he stops on the sidewalk of West Street, with One World Trade Center in the background, and drops two bags of cash. He gets a call and follows the instructions to burn the money. The roof of parking garage on the right is actually from where Tribute in Light, the memorial to the 9/11 is projected each year.
In this new reality, Elliot goes to a basketball court every day, sits on the bleachers and watches the pickup game. This is filmed at Marion Hopkinson Playground in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The court is located at the intersection of Marion Street and Thomas S. Boyland Street in eastern Bed-Stuy. The bleachers are added to the set. Normally, there are park benches there.
The park is named after American Revolution soldiers, Francis Marion and Francis Hopkinson. As the NYC Parks Department notes, ” One of the pathways in the park follows the original route of the Jamaica Plank Road, which dates to the Revolutionary War.”
NYC Parks opened the park originally in 1938 but the basketball court was added in a 2006 renovation, for which it won a “Building Brooklyn” award from the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.
Elliot challenges his father to chess, and the stakes are high. If he wins, his father will disappear from his split personality. If he loses, his father will completely take over like in the times when Elliot can’t remember what he did or what happened to him. They commence a game down a tree-lined alley, which is in Cadman Plaza in downtown Brooklyn. Cadman Plaza is just north of Brooklyn Borough Hall and the Kings County Supreme Court, in front of which one of the city’s Christopher Columbus statues sits. Cadman Plaza is home to a very overlooked World War II memorial, and is also the home to New York City’s Office of Emergency Management, a NASA-like control center.
Darlene’s ex-boyfriend, Cisco, works at the library while moonlighting as the liaison to the Dark Army. He’s given the wireless router here at the Brooklyn Historical Society library by one of the Chinese agents. Actor Michael Drayer, who plays Cisco, does an impressive job speaking Mandarin here. Nonetheless, when he asks too many questions, the Dark Army painfully sticks a piece of metal stuck under his fingernail.
Cisco returns to this library later in season two with Elliot to meet the Dark Army.This popular film location has also appeared in the show Mozart in the Jungle.
The FBI is working out of a floor of E Corp, which is filmed partially in the New York City’s Office of Emergency Management. It’s the control center and main office for the agency responsible for planning and coordinating disaster response across all areas – from flooding, to fires, to diseases and more. This control room shown above is only used during disasters, with desks set up for the various agencies that are affected.
The original Office of Emergency Management was originally located in the Twin Towers, and were destroyed on 9/11. Today, the building is in Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn. We’ve been inside, and the control room really does feel like NASA. Behind this room is a smaller room manned at all hours that scans the news and radio channels for incidents.
Angela is heading to see Darlene, concerned about her exposure as a result of her involvement in the FBI hack. She’s in a taxi cab, and you see Barclays Center, the SHoP Architects designed sports and concert arena in downtown Brooklyn in the background. We hope Angela has a good end game here as we’re not sure how much longer we can take the ice queen/freakout queen combo she has going on.
At this point, Trenton and Mobley pretty much know they’re screwed. For some reason Darlene decided back in the first episode of season 2 that it would be a good idea to use the sweet apartment of Susan Jacobs, Madam Executioner from E Corp, for the F Society headquarters. They kick her out by hacking her fancy technology system inside, and freak her out enough that she goes to her other home in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Of course, she was bound to come back and the F Society team freaks out. They tie her up next to her indoor pool. Darlene then “accidentally” killed kills her tazering her when she knew from hacking Susan’s computer that she had a pacemaker. Jacobs falls into her pool, dead.
Darlene sends Trenton and Mobley out of there so they can perhaps form an escape and avoid getting caught. Here, they’re seen in the Bowery subway station. This is actually filmed in an abandoned platform in the Bowery station, used for NYPD terrorism drills and film shoots. Darlene and Cisco wipe down the apartment and bring Susan’s body in a bag to their favorite dog execution pound, where they burn her body.
In a flashback, we see that Eliot pleads guilty to all the charges against him by the cheating ex of his therapist, Gloria, including stealing his dog and hacking his phone and computer. He gets sentenced to serve time in the “county jail.” Exterior scenes are filmed at the Queens House of Detention in Kew Gardens, Queens located at 126-02 82nd Avenue. It’s no longer an active jail and has been closed since 2002. The connecting buildings are still used for the Queens County Criminal Court however.
The Queens House of Detention also serves prominently as a film location in The Night Of on HBO, standing in for Rikers Island.
Whiterose/Zhang meets with Philip Price, CEO of ECorp, at the Untermyer Gardens in Yonkers, a stunning horticultural destination dubbed “America’s Greatest Forgotten Garden” that overlooks the Hudson River. Philip and Whiterose discuss Angela’s role at ECorp, the failed bailout, and Philip’s influence on the President, which Whiterose hopes will allow China to annex the Congo, in exchange for a $2 trillion no-interest loan to ECorp.
Elliot has been forcibly summoned by Joanna Wellick, who has been getting untraceable calls she believes to be from Tyrell. She wants Elliot to trace the call, hoping to locate her husband. Her bodyguard takes Elliot to his apartment, but Elliot first needs to make a stop at Micro Center, a computer store, to restock on supplies since the police had raided his apartment. Not surprisingly, everything can be bought using ECoin, in addition to dolars.
The location of this Micro Center, a real chain store of electronics, is in Flushing. There is no Micro Center in Manhattan, which would have been logical given that both the Wellicks and Elliot live in the borough.
Darlene and Cisco head to eat at Lupe’s East LA Kitchen, a Mexican restaurant, at 110 6th Avenue, on the corner of Watts Street in Soho while they await for the tests on Darlene’s very injured co-conspirator from the DC attacks. FBI agent Dominique “Dom” DiPierro is in pursuit, since Cisco has been a person of interest connected to the ECorp hack but so is the Dark Army, who arrive and shoot up the joint while Dom is inside. Darlene and Dom survive but Cisco is killed.
Rami Malek plays our protagonist and narrator Elliot Alderson. He has a number of mental issues and according to him “likes morphine a little too much.” His wardrobe consist of black shoes, black jeans and a black hoodie. He wears his hoodie up most of the time, as if he would rather be confused for a shadow rather than an actual person. He hacks everyone he knows, finding out information on everyone from his co-workers, to his therapist and his drug dealer/lover.
The opening scene takes place at “Ron’s Coffee,” a coffee shop chain owned by “Ron,” real name Rohit Mehta. On the side, he runs a child pornography site which Elliot discovered when hacking Ron, after getting suspicious of his way too fast Wifi in the coffee shop. The scene ends when the police come to arrest Ron.
In real life, Ron’s Coffee is actually Think Coffee on 4th Avenue between 12th and 13th Street.
Rami Malek plays our protagonist and narrator Elliot Alderson. He has a number of mental issues and according to him “likes morphine a little too much.” His wardrobe consist of black shoes, black jeans and a black hoodie. He wears his hoodie up most of the time, as if he would rather be confused for a shadow rather than an actual person. He hacks everyone he knows, finding out information on everyone from his co-workers, to his therapist and his drug dealer/lover. He is struggling to understand his purpose in life until he meets a shaggy looking man who could easily be viewed as a homeless man. He doesn’t know his name, only calling him by the name on his jacket “Mr. Robot.” Mr. Robot starts talking to Elliot before getting off on the F/G Church Avenue platform in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where Elliot follows him.
One note – Mr. Robot, played by Christian Slater, tells Elliot that they’re “going to Brooklyn,” but knowledgable New Yorkers will know they are already in Brooklyn.
The exterior of Elliot’s place of employment, Allsafe Security, is also shown as the Trump Soho but interior shots in the pilot are filmed in an office in Midtown East, just near Grand Central Terminal. If you look at the exterior buildings from the window of Allsafe, you’ll recognize the distinctive facade of the Mobil Building at 150 East 42nd Street, the former headquarters of the oil company built in the 1950s. Based on the building you can see from Allsafe CEO, Gideon Goddard’s office, the Allsafe Security is located inside the office skyscraper 639 Third Avenue between 41st and 42nd Street.
But discerning viewers will notice that later episodes show a different office all together. The windows have blinds, so it’s impossible to tell whether it’s a set or a real office building.
We know where Elliot spends his day, what about his evenings? Elliot and his drug dealer turned lover turned girlfriend live in 217 E. Broadway in the Lower East Side/Chinatown area. While we can appreciate the nice touch made by the art department to leave a few E Corp. (the Google/Walmart/Facebook like conglomerate Elliot’s employer offer cyber-security to) posters on the closed dumpling place. The dumpling place, the laundromat next door and the entire building was sold last June for 3.3 million dollars.
Even though he is surrounded by people, lights and the advertisements that make up Times Square (three things Elliot usually tries to avoid at all costs), he can’t help but throw his arms in the air in victory. He has successfully framed the CTO of E. Corp, thanks to the encouragement of Mr. Robot, who runs “F Society” a digital-anarchy group. Mr. Robot wants Elliot to have a front row seat to a digital revolution. The showcase of emotion from our protagonist who rarely speaks let alone move is short lived, as he is picked up by large men in black suits, who instruct him to get inside a large black van with black tinted windows.
In a later scene in the first season, when Elliot is fighting his split personality disorder, he comes back to Times Square in the middle of a mass gathering of masked F Society supporters. He cuts the noise in his head and is shown in an empty Times Square. The production team filmed this scene in the middle of the night.
For more on Times Square, make sure you check out our list of the Top 10 Secrets of Times Square.
After a moment of joy, Elliot’s paranoia is taken to its limits as he is driven to this curved building located on 135 E. 57th Street. Besides its curved appearance the building stands out due to the temple like structure which stands at the entrance. This isn’t the first time this building has been used for film purposes, as it was the offices of Spiderman villain Norman Osborn in Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man film.
Inside the offices of E. Corp (which Elliot prefers to call it Evil Corp) he is confronted by Tyrell Wellick, the new interim CTO of E. Corp and his team of lawyers. Wellick is handsome, well dressed, ambitious, happily married and about to become a father. He is also very Patrick Bateman like in the way he views people and even himself. Wellick sees something in Elliot and wants him to become part of the team. This excellent shot of the two most important people in the series is one filled with tension. Kudos to the location scout for finding this place, with windows that offer a view of the city. While we don’t know if this was done purposefully, but through research and some help, we found out that this space is inside the Trump Soho, a hotel owned by Donald Trump.
“Speaking like a true capitalist” Tyrell tells a local homeless man who asks for a little bit more. What is Tyrell paying for you ask? To beat him up. Tyrell works in a very corporate environment, and like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, he needs something to take the edge off. While Bateman did drugs and sadistically murder people, Tyrell just beats up homeless man. He does this act between Queens Plaza South and 13th Street.
Elliot doesn’t use his hacking for evil, he actually does it for benevolent purposes, most of the time. One example of his good natured hacking, is him hacking a man his therapist has been seeing. To his therapist, Gloria, her date is a likable older man; Elliot, through some sleuthing, finds out that he is actually a married man and he hasn’t even been telling Gloria his real name. His first steps in getting the information of this two-timer is by waiting until Gloria and her date leave Pierre Loti, a wine bar and tapas restaurant, which has three locations in the New York City. This one is located on 301. E. 52nd street. Pierre Loti appears again in a later episode, when Gloria gets tricked to meet the cheater once again, by saying he has cancer.
The group that makes up F Society is a well diverse group that only has people of color, but people of different genders. The two female members of F Society are Trenton, a shy, conservative young woman from a Middle Eastern family and Darlene, who is the exact opposite, brash, loud, and seemingly born without a filter. Trenton tags along with Darlene to meet up another hacking group (The Dark Army), who is helping f society in its grand scheme. One of the first places they look is inside the now former Brooklyn Night Bazaar. Until just recently, the space was used as a mixture of performance space, game room and market. BMW bought the property at 15 Banker Street in Williamsburg, causing the Bazaar to move to Jacob Riis Park. [Update as of 2019, the building has been demolished and a new building is rising in its place].
One of the most important moments of the series short run is the conversation between Elliot and Mr. Robot on the Coney Island Boardwalk. Part of Coney Island Beach, the Boardwalk is a favorite destination for beach goers in the summer and tourists year round. Usually when put on film, the boardwalk is idyllic and sunny, however it’s just as gorgeous in the winter, don’t believe us? Well, we have a great photo essay that shows Coney Island‘s looking pretty interesting in the winter months.
The worlds most dangerous hacking crew’s base of operations is inside an abandoned arcade in Coney Island. Well, actually, don’t let the old sign fool you, the Eldorado Arcade in Coney Island is anything but abandoned. It’s still operating and has been a fixture on Surf Avenue and The Bowery for decades. Bumper cars, games and of course, arcade games fill up the two building facility.
The exterior of F society is filmed but the interior is a set at Silvercup Studios on Long Island City.
When Elliot goes MIA, Darlene convinces Angela, who is mad at Elliot, to help in the search. Angela asks Darlene to meet her at the Queens Museum, a favorite spot of theirs, where Elliot always went in times of trouble. The girls in the room with the model of New York City, known as the Panorama of the City of New York. On this map, which is always being updated, you can actually adopt monuments and buildings. They are unable find Elliot here.
Darlene meets both Cisco, her ex-boyfriend who is the liaison to the Dark Army and Trenton at locations in Brooklyn College (separately). Cisco tells her he never wants to see her again because she’s been using his profile to coordinate a meet with the Dark Army, but that the Dark Army has agreed.
Elliot wakes up after two days in Tyrell Wellick’s SUV in a parking lot, below Nick Walker’s Love Vandal street art piece. It’s located on 17th Street and 6th Avenue in Chelsea. He’s completely confused and spends the next episodes trying to figure out what happened to him, gradually realizing he (or Tyrell forcing him) executed the hack.
The brother of Shayla’s drug dealer, Fernando Vila, takes Elliot to Newtown Creek on the border of Queens and Brooklyn to execute him (in broad daylight, incredibly). That’s what Elliot realizes the brother is trying to take over Vila’s network and screw him over.
After Angela joins E. Corp, she witnesses the suicide of one of the top leadership live while on the job (the rest of the world watches it on live TV). The CEO of E. Corp, after giving her a half hearted reassurance, encourages her to join the press announcement, which takes place in Gotham Hall, a former bank next to Herald Square now used as an event space.
Next, check out the NYC film locations for Daredevil and Jessica Jones.
He is sure in the mood for Raspberry Pie, to offer him some contact the author on twitter @ChrisLInoa
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