New Amsterdam, in a nomenclature nod to the first settlement in New York City, is the name of a new medical drama on NBC that focuses on a fictional public hospital in Manhattan. In the show, “New Amsterdam Hospital,” standing in for the real Bellevue Hospital, is the oldest public hospital in America and it has a new medical director, Dr. Max Goodwin (played by Ryan Eggold from The Blacklist). Goodwin is intent on shaking things up, but has demons of his own to battle, including throat cancer and a child on the way with a somewhat estranged wife.
The cast is rounded out by other doctors in the hospital (emergency doctor Dr. Lauren Bloom, played by Janet Montgomery; Dr. Floyd Reynolds, played by Jocko Sims, Dr. Helen Shape, played by Freema Agyeman; psychiatrist Dr. Iggy Frome, played by Tyler Labine; and Dr. Vijay Kapoor, played by Anupam Kher). The show is based on the memoir Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital by Eric Mannheimer, who served as medical director of Bellevue for over thirteen years. Here are the filming locations featured in the show so far:
1. New Amsterdam Hospital
New Amsterdam Hospital is filmed in a mix of locations, which include the real Bellevue Hospital, Kings County Hospital in Prospect Lefferts Garden, Brooklyn, and Metropolitan Hospital in Harlem. The most memorable filming location is the main lobby of Bellevue Hospital at 462 First Avenue (pictured above), which includes the original brick building facade behind a new glass one, which creates a light-filled atrium. It’s in here that Dr. Goodwin runs into Dr. Helen Sharpe, the British doctor who serves as the one-woman PR machine for New Amsterdam. Goodwin later calls his wife from an upper level that overlooks the atrium. Also in the first episode, the scene where psychiatrist Dr. Iggy Frome’s patient meets a potential new foster mother is filmed in the garden next to this building just north of 26th Street. Our sources tell us that beyond the pilot, the hospital scenes are filmed at Kings County Hospital and on sound stages in Mount Vernon and Yonkers.
It’s true that Bellevue Hospital treated the first known case of ebola in New York City, though unlike in the show, it was not a patient who accidentally took himself there (nor was he a hapless transmitter of the supposed disease, to be used for terrorist reasons). In real life, the patient was a doctor from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital who had worked in Guinea on the ebola epidemic with Doctors Without Borders, and once he tested positive, he was moved to Bellevue Hospital for quarantine and treatment. You can read more about the history of Bellevue here.