How to Make a Subway Map with John Tauranac
Hear from an author and map designer who has been creating maps of the NYC subway, officially and unofficially, for over forty years!
HBO’s hit show Succession is currently in its fourth and final season. We’ll be revealing the filming locations used in each episode as they air weekly. You can also catch up on all the fabulous Succession filming locations of the first three seasons in this list. The drama is one of those shows that grows on you and suddenly hits you with a bang, making that binge session worth it.
The show certainly packs a lot of star power behind the scenes and in the cast. Succession is executive produced by Oscar-winner Adam McKay (The Big Short), Frank Rich (HBO’s “Veep”), Will Ferrell, Kevin Messick, Jane Tranter (HBO’s The Night Of) and Mark Mylod (HBO’s “Entourage”), and created by Oscar-winner Jesse Armstrong (In the Loop), who is also the series showrunner and an executive producer. The music is written by two-time Oscar nominee Nicholas Britell, who also composed the soundtrack to The Big Short and Moonlight.
The cast of Succession is led by Shakespearean actor Brian Cox, who plays Logan Roy. The parallels to the Murdoch family are impossible to miss, down to the “ATN Network,” clearly a stand-in for FOX News. In previous seasons, storylines drew on political upheaval in the United States. Other notable actors on the show include Kieran Culkin, who plays Logan’s waywardly youngest son Roman, Matthew Macfayden as Tom Wamsgams, husband of Logan’s daughter Siobhan “Shiv” Roy, and Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy, Logan’s second son who appeared to be the heir apparent of Waystar Royco at the opening of the second season. As we go into Season 4, the tension between Logan and his children is at an all-time high.
Succession films mostly in New York City (with forays to Washington D.C., Long Island, New Mexico, England, and more foreign Succession filming locations in season three), embodying the locales of the rich and powerful. Influence is the name of the game here, but Machiavelli and Shakespeare are ever-present.
Episode 9 of Succession, the penultimate in the series, is a somber one as the Roy family attends Logan’s funeral. The church service, where Roman, Kendall, and Shiv all give a eulogy, was shot at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola. The church is on Park Avenue, close to where Logan’s Fifth Avenue townhouse is supposed to be on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
The congregation was founded by Irish immigrants in 1851. Their first church was a simple wooden structure at the corner of 84th Street named for St. Lawrence O’Toole, an Irish Bishop. As the congregation grew, and administration was transferred to the Jesuits, the church earned enough money to construct a larger and more grand building. The classical limestone building we see today opened in 1900 and was declared a New York City Landmark in 1969.
After funeral services at the church and the cemetery, attendees went to the St. Regis Hotel for a reception. The historic hotel was built by John Jacob Astor IV in 1904 and was the tallest New York City hotel at the time. The Roys and fellow well-to-do mourners are the typical clientele of the hotel which has hosted royals, celebrities, and politicians for over a century.
The hotel is known for its famous bar, the King Cole Bar, which is covered in murals by Maxfield Parrish, but the scenes in Succession were shot in the opulent Rooftop Ballroom. Located on the 20th floor, the room is decorated with gilt chandeliers, lavender drapery, a gold details.
In episode 7, the Roy family is back in New York after a jaunt over to the West Coast. Early in the episode, we see the Roy siblings meet up for dinner at the Michelin-star restaurant Jean-Georges. The high-end restaurant opened in 1997 at 1 Central Park West inside the Trump International Hotel. The sleek and sophisticated dining room was designed by redesigned by Thomas Juul‑Hansen, with lighting by L’Observatoire. The menu features French, American, and Asian-inspired dishes.
On his way to Jean Georges, Kendall has an encounter with his ex-wife Rava outside of a coffee shop, and it does not go well. The coffee shop, Birch Coffee, is a chain with locations all over Manhattan, but this one is located at 171 E 88th Street on the Upper East Side.
Greenwich Village Coffee Tour
Most of episode 7 takes place in Shiv’s apartment which is the penthouse of 270 Broadway. This unit is on the 27th and 28th floors of the office-to-residential conversion located on the corner of Chambers Street, across from City Hall Park in TriBeCa.The high-end penthouse was designed by Brown Harris Stevens.
Episode 6 sees the Roy clan head out west to visit Waystar Studios in California. Throughout the episode, we see the characters in various offices, sets, and backlots. The majority of the episode was filmed at the Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank. Some eagle-eyed fans even spotted sets from other television shows in the scene where Roman is being driven through the backlot on a golf cart.
While all of episode 6 takes place in Los Angeles, one of its most important scenes was actually shot right here in New York City. When Kendall gives his big speech on Investor Day, it takes place at the Waystar Studios. The filming location that was used however for the interior theater shots was NYU Skirball in Greenwich Village.
This cultural center at 566 LaGuardia Place is part of New York University and its mission is to “present adventuresome, transdisciplinary work that inspires yet frustrates, confirms yet confounds, entertains yet upends.” At the theater, you can see everything from talks and dance performances to award ceremonies and plays.
Episode 5 sees the Roy clan travel abroad as they head to important meetings in Norway. The filming locations change from Manhattan skyscrapers and penthouses to breathtaking mountain views. According to The Norway Guide, the location we see most in this episode is Nesaksla Mountain. There the characters can be seen riding the Romsdal Gondola and dining at the mountaintop restaurant.
In the episode, the characters stay at the Juvet Landscape Hotel. This hotel also served as a filming location for the movie Ex Machina. The hotel is comprised of a series of sleek cabins with stunning views of the forest that surrounds it. The episode also gives us glimpses of the Atlantic Ocean Road, The Trollstigen hairpin path, and a popular boardwalk attraction that hovers above the scenic Gudbrandsjuvet, ravine.
In the opening shots of episode 4, we see the Roy children reflecting on the shocking events of the previous episode. Kendall looks pensive as he sits in his penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side in a scene shot at 180 East 88th Street. This newly constructed tower from Joe McMillan’s DDG offers the highest residence north of 72nd Street in Manhattan. The penthouse Kendall occupies is currently on sale, in real life, for $29 million.
The 5,508-square-foot penthouse features 5 bedrooms, multiple outdoor spaces, a private elevator to get to all three floors, and an exclusive rooftop outdoor space with stunning views of Central Park and the New York City skyline. It’s located just a few blocks away from the Guggenheim Museum. The rest of the episode takes place in Logan’s Fifth Avenue townhouse.
Connor’s wedding begins at Pier 15 next to South Street Seaport before everyone heads to Ellis Island on a Hornblower boat. A dramatic event occurs that causes them to get off the boat, taking the Affinity run by the Manhattan Yacht Charter company instead.
The siblings (minus Connor plus Frank from Waystar Royco) grab a helicopter at the Manhattan heliport, a location oft-used in Succession in previous seasons. The helicopter takes them to the private Teterboro airport.
The photograph of the heliport above is of a Marine Osprey helicopter. Untapped New York got to see this craft at the downtown Manhattan Heliport during Fleet Week on a visit to the USS New York.
Teterboro Airport in New Jersey is a popular private airport for the rich and powerful. On-screen, it has appeared in several television shows including The Flight Attendant. It has also been the site of some real-life drama. It is where Jeffrey Epstein was arrested. In 2019, a WWII Spitfire airplane made a stop at Teterboro on a global tour.
Beginning operations in 1919, Teterboro Airport is the oldest operating airport in the New York and New Jersey metropolitan areas. It was founded by Walter C. Teter. A manufacturing plant operated at the site during World War I. Dutch aircraft designer Anthony Fokker used the facilities after the war. At the onset of World War II, the site was used by the Army and Air Force. Today, Teterboro is operated by the Port Authority and serves as a reliever airport, meaning there are no regularly scheduled public flights in and out.
Connor and Willa finally tie the knot at Ellis Island in the type of ceremony that Willa wanted from the beginning, a small one. The site offers beautiful views of New York Harbor with the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline in the background.
Ellis Island Hard Hat Tour
Ellis Island is famously known for the immigration center that operated there from 1892 to 1954, but it has served many purposes throughout history. At various times the island was used for catching oysters, storing ammunition, as a Coast Guard training station, and more.
The final season begins with Logan Roy’s birthday at his townhouse on Fifth Avenue, but only one of his children is there. The sprawling Fifth Avenue townhouse shared by Logan Roy and his third wife Marcia “Marcy” Roy is one of the regular Succession filming locations we see throughout the series. The lobby of the townhouse is filmed in the American Irish Historical Society at 991 Fifth Avenue located across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The upper floors of the townhouse are created on a soundstage at Silvercup Studios in Long Island City. Production designer Stephen Carter tells Architectural Digest that he was inspired by the homes of Edgar Bronfman and Charles Bronfman, who had townhouses on the same section of Fifth Avenue as Logan Roy’s is. There is a real vintage elevator in the American Irish Historical Society, so the set recreates this interior experience.
The upper floors of the American Irish Historical Society do not appear in the show but are quite stunning. According to Christopher Cahill, a poet and the director of the AIHS, the main floors of the townhouse are one of the “least altered interiors,” still extant from a 1911 renovation by the architect Ogden Codman, Jr. known for co-authoring Edith Wharton’s first book, The Decoration of Houses. In 2020, it was announced that the American Irish Historical Society would be putting the townhouse on sale for a record $52 million.
Tom Wamsgams calls Shiv, now his estranged wife, in what appears to be a call deliberately to unsettle her. He tells her that he was seen out with Naomi Pierce, Kendall’s ex-girlfriend, and wants to give her the heads up. He calls from inside The Mark Hotel at 25 E 77th Street on his way to Logan’s birthday party.
The Mark Hotel is a luxury, 5-start hotel on Madison Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Constructed in 1927, the upscale hotel was reimagined in 2009 with new interiors by noted French interior designer Jacques Grange. The Mark Hotel is a favorite of celebrities and is the hotel of choice for many Met Gala attendees. Rapper Drake recently stayed at the hotel and reportedly paid $75,000 a night for a 10,000-square-foot suite while he was in New York to play shows at The Apollo.
Leaving his own birthday, Logan goes for a solitary walk in Central Park along The Mall. Logan’s stroll ends at a diner where he shares a meal with his bodyguard and they talk about markets.
The Mall is a quarter-mile pedestrian path that runs mid-park from 66th to 72nd Streets. It’s the widest path in the park and the only intentionally straight path. When Calvert and Vaux designed the Park, they did so with great reverence for natural, curving forms.
Logan, Shiv, and Roman have to get back to New York City by car when Logan won’t let them on the helicopter. As a result, they arrive late to an engagement party for Willa and Connor at the Four Seasons inside the Seagram Building. Willa is a little drunk and clearly rethinking things about the wedding.
Today, the Four Seasons Restaurant, which operated from 1959 to 2019, has been re-invented as The Pool, a contemporary seafood restaurant with a marble pool as its centerpiece. The interior spaces were originally designed by Philip Johnson and in 1989 were designated as one of New York City’s rare interior landmarks. When the restaurant was under restoration, it was unclear what would happen to its giant Picasso tapestry. Eventually, the tapestry was saved and transferred to the New-York Historical Society.
After the engagement party goes south, Logan, Shiv, and Roman take Connor out for the rest of the night. They head down to Chelsea and go into the dive bar Peter McManus at 152 7th Avenue on 19th Street. Kendall gets an unsettling call here.
The old-school spot has a long wooden bar, two vintage phone booths, and tv screens for sports. Opened in 1936, the bar claims to be the oldest family-run bar in New York City and it’s no stranger to film shoots. The bar has appeared on screen in movies like Highlander (1986) starring Sean Connery, Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987), and The Other Guys (2010). It can be seen in television shows including Seinfeld, Law and Order, Saturday Night Live, and Broad City.
After the Peter McManus Cafe, Connor decides he’d like to do karaoke like he’s seen in the movies. The gang heads to Koreatown. Once there they book a private room at Maru Karaoke Lounge. It’s all fun and games until Logan and Kerry show up.
Koreatown is one of the many ethnic enclaves that dot New York City. The proliferation of Korean businesses in the area started with a bookstore called “Koryo Books” and the restaurant Kom Tang. A large influx of Korean immigrants in the 1980s contributed to the growth of the area. Now, there are around 100 businesses located along “Korea Way,” the stretch of 32nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Keep reading for a recap of Succession filming locations from the past three seasons!
It looks like downtown Manhattan is the name of the game for the opening of the third season, with Kendall Roy emerging from the privately-owned public space courtyard between the Four Seasons Private Residences, located at 30 Park Place, and the Woolworth Building. As you will see from the next filming location, he has made the apartment in the Woolworth Tower Residences that his ex-wife lives in the headquarters for his legal efforts.
The Four Seasons Private Residences stands taller than the Woolworth Building, dwarfing what was once the world’s tallest building located just east of it. The Four Seasons was previously featured as a filming location in Ray Donovan.
The Pinnacle Apartment within the Woolworth Tower Residences is where Kendall Roy is holing up. His wife and children live there, and we can make the assumption that he potentially lived there before the divorce. After all, the $22.5 million apartment has five bedrooms and four bathrooms, plus two powder rooms. There’s a 27,70o square foot duplex terrace (where you see Roman take a phone call), six skylights, and 22-foot ceilings. The most distinctive feature within the apartment is the spiral staircase that goes between floors. The entrance to the Woolworth Tower Residences is at 2 Park Place, around the corner from the formal entrance to the Woolworth Building, which still contains offices. Scenes also take place on the street just outside the apartment building as well as at the entrance.
The top brass at Waystar Royco, along with Logan, go to a private airport, which is filmed at Ross Aviation in Westchester. But they don’t know where they are going yet, awaiting direction from Logan, who is deciding which non-extradition country they should fly to. For the characters to get to and from the airport, there are several scenes in cars along the West Side Highway and the FDR Drive. The scenes when everyone is supposedly at Sarajevo are filmed in Italy.
Cousin Greg meets up with his grandfather (played by James Cromwell) at the rear entrance of the Foundation Building at Cooper Union, the private college in the heart of Manhattan’s East Village. Its Great Hall is where Abraham Lincoln spoke in 1860 and has become a speechmaking locale for America’s Presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Woodrow Wilson.
Greg’s grandfather agrees to help him get legal representation in the contested Roy family battle for power, in which Greg’s role has been a linchpin. They sit in Cooper Triangle, a small park at 7th Street and Cooper Square.
The Waystar Royco offices are filmed at the World Trade Center in both 4 WTC and 7 WTC, where you can see Manhattan skyline views of Tribeca, Midtown, and Lower Manhattan but also on a soundstage. When a television studio set is needed, the production uses the studio of SNY, the online sports channel, headquartered in 4 WTC.
In season two, you see Kendall arrive by motorcycle to the street in front of 28 Liberty Street, across from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This building has been appearing a lot recently in television shows including Billions and Iron Fist. Set decorator George DeTitta, Jr. told Architectural Digest that he took cues from the Murdoch offices: “I looked online at the Murdoch media offices for inspiration and went for a more clean, modern approach.” Season three continues to situate the Waystar office at 28 Liberty Street.
When Logan impromptu proposes that “it’s time to play the game” at his 80th birthday lunch, we soon see that it involves taking several helicopters from the Downtown Manhattan Heliport located on the East River near Wall Street. The heliport services several helicopter companies as well as government helicopters. [We recently took a Marine Osprey helicopter from the downtown Manhattan Heliport during Fleet Week to visit the USS New York.] You may also recognize the heliport from the movie Wolf of Wall Street.
When Logan suffers a stroke on the helicopter ride back from the family estate, he is whisked to Bellevue Hospital. The hospital on Manhattan’s East Side also recently was a shooting location for the NBC medical drama New Amsterdam. He clearly gets a pretty swanky suite at the hospital, which may be a set, but the scenes where the siblings talk in an amphitheater are located in Bellevue Hospital, and you see some scenes just outside the hospital on the street.
Logan Roy is honored at Waystar Royco’s annual company gala in the Cunard Building, the former shipping company-turned-banquet hall on Broadway in Lower Manhattan. The Cunard Building was designed by the architect Benjamin Wistar Morris along with the architectural firm Carrere & Hastings. Morris worked with muralist Ezra Winter to create a decor plan that focused on marine and shipping themes for the building. The building’s lobby served as the business’s ticketing hall, which was 183 feet long with a 68-foot dome, until 1968.
The ticketing hall is now owned by Cipriani S.A. as an event space and has been featured in many television shows including Gotham and The Blacklist. Though the Cunard building is rarely open to the public, except for private events, Untapped Cities partnered with the show D.S. Destiny to offer access inside the ticketing hall last year.
Kendall, Roman, Frank Vernon (Logan’s long time friend and board member of Waystar Royco), and Waystar legal counsel Gerri meet at the Chelsea Square Diner located at 368 W. 23rd Street at the intersection of 9th Avenue to plot out the final moves in the planned no-confidence vote against Logan. Gerri mentions that she feels sure nobody will recognize them in the diner, which proves true, but things don’t go as planned afterward.
On the way to Washington D.C. (we assume she’s taking Amtrak and will get out at Union Station), Shiv calls Tom from the new Penn Station entrance in the Farley Post Office building across from Madison Square Garden. It leads to the West End concourse, a generally more pleasant way to get onto the Long Island Rail Road than the normal entrances to Penn Station.
If you’re a transit fan, join us for an upcoming tour of the Remnants of Penn Station where you’ll see what’s left of the original, grand station that once stood here:
Tour of the Remnants of Penn Station
Tom Wamsgams has, for some reason, selected Roman Roy to plan his bachelor party. You never know where Roman’s loyalty really lies, but like the rest of the Roy children, getting on Logan’s good side tends to trump everything else. So, instead of going to Prague, he jumps at an opportunity offered by Stewy, Kendall’s financier friend who gets on the board of Waystar Royco during the first season. Stewy says that Sandy Furness attends the underground Rhomboid parties, and Furness controls 50 local television stations that Logan wants to acquire. Stewy plants the seed that Roman could help enable Logan’s “dream deal,” and with that, the bachelor party gets moved to the upcoming Rhomboid party.
The bachelor party shows up at a railroad track and walks into a tunnel. This is filmed at the abandoned East New York Freight Tunnel (the actual party is filmed in a warehouse in Sunset Park, Brooklyn). Though built for freight, it was part of a route by the Pennsylvania railroad to connect New Jersey to the northeast going from Bay Ridge to New England, there was also passenger train activity and a station here. Today, this is evidenced by an abandoned platform that once was part of the New York and Manhattan Beach Railway, a line that went from Long Island City and Bay Ridge to the luxury resorts on Manhattan Beach. This is a pretty great filming location that we haven’t seen in previous shows and demonstrates that the film scouts know New York City very well!
Shiv and Tom get married (not without the characteristic cringes, awkwardness, and tragedy that comes with anything connected to the Roy family) in England, an attempt by Shiv to placate her mother who lives and is from the country. They are married in what is purported to be her mother’s family’s estate, and the wedding was actually shot at one of the few international Succession filming locations, Eastnor Castle, a medieval castle in Herefordshire that was actually built in the early 1800s. It has appeared in many television shows and films over the years for period dramas, as well as for more modern-day uses as an off-roading test track for Land Rovers and in an episode of The Amazing Race.
Following the aftermath of Shiv’s wedding, Kendall’s accident, and his failed takeover of Waystar Royco, Logan calls for another family summit. This time, they are at what appears to be a new acquisition, or at least, a new renovation: a mansion in the Hamptons. This real-life 42-acre estate, originally built for the Ford family is known as Jule Pond, located on Mecox Bay in Southampton.
Currently for sale, it was originally listed in 2017 for $175 million and recently dropped to $145 million. It is said to have the “largest ocean frontage” in all of the Hamptons and was originally an astounding 235-acre property called “Fordune.” Like other Gilded Age mansions in America, much of the interiors were shipped over from Europe’s chateaux and castles.
Kendall goes in Logan’s stead to meet Stewey and Sandy Furness. If viewers recall, Kendall was working with Stewey and Sandy to take over Waystar until his accident. Kendall goes to the downstairs room of Del Posto at 85 Tenth Avenue.
Stewey, a long-time friend of Kendall, knows more is going on. Kendall sticks to the line fed by his father, and Stewey gets increasingly angry. Kendall then delivers a very dramatic picture of what will happen next to Sandy and the team if they move forward. This Succession filming location was also seen in Billions.
The office of Vaulter, which Kendall is about to gut on behalf of his father, is located at One Hudson Square (aka 75 Varick Street). In Tribeca, just off Canal Street near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, this building (and the neighborhood) is home to many real media and advertising companies including Horizon Media, Edelman, and more. This makes the film location pretty fitting for the fictional Vaulter company.
Incidentally, this office building is just a stone’s throw from the apartment inhabited by Bobby Axelrod in Billions, located at 145 Hudson Street.
The annual corporate retreat for the board of Waystar Royco supposedly takes place in Hungary, but is actually filmed at one of the Succession filming locations outside of New York City, Oheka Castle in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The Gilded Age mansion of Otto Kahn, now often used for weddings, the 127-room estate is the second-largest private house in the United States. During the heydays of the Gold Coast of Long Island during the 1920s, Kahn used the lavish estate to host extravagant parties and entertain royalty, heads of state, and Hollywood stars.
Next, check out the filming locations for Billions on Showtime.
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