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Season three of The Sinner just released on Netflix (it premiered on USA Network last year). Based on the filming locations for The Sinner, you may be surprised to discover that Lieutenant Harry Ambrose (Bill Pullman) has relocated to the Hudson Valley of New York, in a fictional town called Dorchester. The storyline, a psychological crime investigation, as the previous seasons, takes place between Dorchester and New York City. We put on our eagle eye glasses and share with you the filming locations for The Sinner, season three!
Photo: Peter Kramer/USA Network
As mentioned, there is no town of Dorchester in New York. The town is fictional but the show clearly worked with Metro-North (and the MTA) to create signage that looks authentic for the fictional Dorchester train station. The train station scenes, where Ambrose picks up his daughter and granddaughter, and where Jamie Burns (played by Matt Bomer) commutes to and from to his job in New York City, is filmed at the Hartsdale Metro-North train station. The Tudor-style train station was designed by Warren and Wetmore, the same architectural firm behind Grand Central Terminal. There’s a more modern sky bridge that connects the two platforms. Hartsdale, located in Westchester County next to Scarsdale, is also where Malcolm X is buried.
Other parts of Dorchester, like the quaint main street, are filmed Hastings-on-Hudson, a town recently seen in television in the Amazon series Modern Love. The diner with the neon signage where Ambrose sees artist Sonya Barzel, whose property the accident in question on The Sinner takes place on, is the Hastings Center Restaurant and Diner (renamed Dorchester Diner on the windows). The shop run by Jamie’s pregnant wife (Leela Burns, played by Parisa Fitz-Henley) is the Found Herbal Apothecary in Hastings-on-Hudson.
Photo: Peter Kramer/USA Network
The Briarton School, the private school that Jamie works out, is filmed at the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church located at 75 E. 93rd Street.
The split staircase and brick building is very distinctive, and you may recognize it as a film location The Undoing, where it also served as a private school, and in Gossip Girl as well.
Photo: Peter Kramer/USA Network
The building used for the Dorchester Police Station is actually the Mt. Pleasant Justice Court building located in Valhalla, New York, also in Westchester County.
Photo: Peter Kramer/USA Network
In a flashback to a few days before the events in question, Jamie and his college friend Nick Haas (played creepily by Chris Messina) have dinner at STK Midtown, on 43rd Street right next to Bryant Park . Something happens there which explains one of Nick’s injuries later. The futuristic restaurant has been a filming location in Iron Fist. The restaurant is designed by the firm ICRAVE, which has worked on projects as wide ranging as JFK Airport Food Hall, Le District downtown at Brookfield Place, the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and the restaurant and club Lavo in Manhattan.
After dinner, they head up to the rooftop of the restaurant to test their limits (part of an on-going theme about the duo’s exploration of what it means to be alive). However, this rooftop is not actually in the building that STK Midtown is in, which is the Grace Building. It’s actually located much further west in Manhattan at…
The rooftop scene is filmed on top of Hudson Mercantile, located at 500 W 36th Street on 9th Avenue. Hudson Mercantile is an event space and studio, which also rents out its rooftop for events.
Photo: Peter Kramer/USA Network
One of the story lines involved Jamie’s devolving relationship with one of his students, Emma (played by Leyla Felder) who is requesting a recommendation letter for her application to Brown. Jamie, making a connection with his owned failure to complete the first college he attended, counsels her at the Chelsea Square Diner, not to apply to Brown after all for her own mental health and well-being. The Chelsea Square Diner is located at 368 W 23rd St, on the corner of 9th Avenue and was a film location recently in Succession.
After this meeting, Jamie walks in the rain and seems to consider getting himself hit by a city bus (not quite a recent MTA bus model, by the way). However, this scene is filmed far from the Chelsea Square Diner. It takes place in front of the Corner Bookstore on the Upper East Side, at 1313 Madison Avenue at 93rd Street, just a block from the filming location for the Briarton School.
Templeton University is the fictional college that Jamie and Nick attended. Ambrose goes to speak to one of their professors, who had taught them Nietzsche, among other writers. The university scene is filmed at the City College of New York, a Gothic-style campus in Upper Manhattan often used when a “Ivy League”-looking campus is needed for filming locations. It has been used in place of Yale as a filming location in Billions.
Photo: Elizabeth Fisher/USA Network
Ambrose follows Jamie to New York City as he goes on a bender. They start out an art gallery near Flatiron where he runs into a former student from The Briarton School. Then they go to a bar where he befriends two guys who are trying to pick up to Australian women. They relocate to a hotel (shown to be at the Met Life Building) to drink and do drugs, and Ambrose goes along as a kind of chaperone.
After a disagreement, Jamie then hails a cab and heads out Greenpoint, Brooklyn (address of 234 Morgan Avenue but it’s actually a higher address number just off the BQE). The car chase after Jamie goes to meet up with his former student is filmed in Long Island City (another popular filming locations due to the proximity of the Kaufman-Astoria studios.
We’ll be adding more locations as the season continues! Stay tuned! Next, check out the filming locations for The Undoing.
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