8. Seaman’s Retreat, Staten Island
There’s a quick shot in episode five of Hunters, that shows the fictional Tilda Sauer, a propagandist filmmaker (clearly modeled after the real Leni Riefenstahl), on a dolly shooting a scene. This scene said to be from Germany in 1935 is shot at the abandoned Seaman’s Retreat hospital, which sits within the operational Bayley-Seton hospital.
Built in the 1830s, the facility was a medical facility for retired seamen, and and was in fact, Staten Island’s first hospital. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of seamen passed through these doors for care over its nearly 150 year history. The main colonnade building in front of which the scene was filmed at the Seaman’s Retreat is an official New York City landmark, but sits abandoned.
If you’re wondering where the modern glass house is that belongs to Tilda in the 1970s, who is now Barbara Sukowa, it really is in Westchester. It’s located at 104 Marlborough Road in Briarcliff Manor, an hour or so north of New York City. It was built by architect Roy O. Allen, Jr., a partner at the firm SOM.
