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The Episcopal Church of the Mediator is full of splendid treasures that may soon be lost.
The Undoing is a new series from HBO Max set in New York City starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant, Donald Sutherland, and Édgar Ramírez. The stately filming locations for The Undoing add much to the drama of the thriller, setting the tone for a sequence of events that jolts the rarified Upper East Side society of Manhattan, of which husband and wife Grace and Jonathan Fraser (played by Kidman and Grant) belong. Their son Henry (played by Noah Jupe) is in a fictional private school called The Reardon School. A mysterious woman named Elena Alvez from Harlem, whose son has just joined the school as a scholarship student, gets sidelined by the alpha group of moms who run the school’s fundraising committee. Grace, a successful psychologist, takes an interest in Elena, and over the first two episodes of the series, Elena’s life comes into clearer view while Grace’s rapidly unravels.
The Undoing is directed by Susanne Bier, who directed Birdbox and The Night Manager. Her latest does not skimp on its filming locations — featuring over a dozen locations in just the first two episodes to authentically create the world of the Frasers. Take a look at the filming locations for The Undoing so far! (If you haven’t seen few episodes, there may be some spoilers below):
We know from the first few minutes of The Undoing that someone is found dead. The show doesn’t keep you in suspense for long, cutting to a gruesome flash forward scene throughout the first two episodes, revealing a little more each time. We quickly learn that the boy running to the studio is Miguel Alvaraz, Elena’s son.
The studio is located in Harlem at 181 Lenox Avenue (also known as Malcolm X Avenue) at 119th Street. If this looks familiar to you, it’s because it’s the exact same location of “Pop’s Barbershop” in the Netflix show, Luke Cage. Funny enough, in The Undoing also has barbershop signage, for “El Morro Barbershop”.
Photo: David Giesbrecht/HBO
In The Undoing, the Frasers live with their son Henry on the Upper East Side. The 5-floor brick townhouse is located at 8 East 63rd Street between 5th Avenue and Madison Avenue less than a block from Central Park. The home is actually for sale at $29,995,000 — likely one of the reasons it was used as a film location. It was last sold for $9.25 million in 2013. The building number has been changed to No. 3 for the purposes of the filming, a standard practice for film shoots.
But interestingly enough, the interior of the house is shot somewhere else. The cozier interiors gives the Frasers a little more down-to-earth feel which could make sense given their jobs as two doctors. It’s also made clear in the first episode that Grace comes from a wealthy family and her father is paying for Henry’s private school. The interiors of the Frasers’ home make a contrast to the classic interiors of the grander townhouse Grace goes to for the meeting of the fundraising group for the school.
Photo: David Giesbrecht/HBO
The Reardon School is a fictional name but that brick courtyard with the staircase you see is actually the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church located at 75 E. 93rd Street. You may recognize it as a film location for Gossip Girl as well, standing in for the Constance Billard School for Girls and the St. Jude School for Boys. Similar to what The Reardon School is hoping to achieve with accepting a student like Miguel, private schools in new York City also recruit for diversity using programs like Prep for Prep.
The Alvarez’ live a very different lifestyle than the Frasers and their friends. They live in East Harlem at 102 E. 103rd Street, a few blocks east of The Museum of the City of New York. One block away are the elevated tracks of the Metro North line that goes from Grand Central to 125th Street and beyond.
Almost all of the mom friends of Grace Fraser have something snarky to say about Elena and the show puts the question in the viewers’ mind — is there something strange about Elena or are the other women looking down on her because of her socioeconomic differences?
Photo: Niko Tavernise/HBO
Jonathan Fraser works at Price-Norbury Memorial Hospital (or does he?). The filming location for the hospital is actually Mount Sinai West hospital located at 1000 10th Avenue just south of Lincoln Center.
You see Jonathan walking in front of the hospital on Amsterdam Avenue while on the phone with Grace. Later, Grace stops by the hospital looking for Jonathan and meets one of his colleagues.
Photo: Niko Tavernise/HBO
In several scenes, we see Henry walking to school through Central Park with one of his parents. In the first episode, we see Jonathan and Henry walking through the north end of Central Park which, if you want to be nitpicky, is north of the real life location of Henry’s school, but the landscape is nice!
In a scene in the second episode, Grace and Henry are walking through Central Park near 90th Street, heading north which makes sense. You can see the Cooper Hewitt-Smithsonian Design Museum in the distance and to their left is the Central Park Reservoir.
Grace’s psychologist practice is shown to be at 1107 Fifth Avenue. When we first see the office in The Undoing, Grace’s receptionist makes a reference to “Rebekah Harkness,” the code name for one of Grace’s patients. Rebekah was the wife of William Hale “Bill” Harkness, the heir to Standard Oil. She was the subject of a recent Taylor Swift song, The Last Great American Dynasty.
Photo: Niko Tavernise/HBO
The Reardon School fundraiser takes place at One State Street. The main topic of gossip is the attendance of Elena while Jonathan leaves early to take care of a patient at the hospital. Elena cuts out early, and turns down Grace’s offer to take her car back home.
We see the lobby of the building as Grace and Jonathan enter. One State Street is meant to seem like an apartment building in The Undoing, with one of the families at the school loaning their apartment for the event. In real life, this is a 42-floor office building. It had a renovation in recent years, but in 2011, we were taken into a bizarre abandoned floor in the building that an artist had made his studio.
Photo: Niko Tavernise/HBO
Grace’s father, played by Donald Sutherland, lives in a pre-war apartment at 1215 Fifth Avenue just south of The Museum of the City of New York. As Grace tries to piece together what’s going on, she goes there for advice. The NYPD detectives, Joe Mendoza (played by Edgar Ramirez) and Paul O’Rourke (played by Michael Devine) come to ask questions and she meets them in the lobby.
Grace goes with the detectives to the 23rd Precinct, which in real life is located at 162 E. 102nd Street. However, in The Undoing, a building in Alphabet City called The Boys and Girls Republic, run by the Henry Street Settlement, is used as the filming location and set up to look like a police precinct. Grace’s father has grave misgivings about her going without a lawyer but Grace’s desire to know more about what’s going on outweighs the warnings.
Photo by David Giesbrecht/HBO
Grace meets her father in the Frick Collection, a museum of art on the Upper East Side that once belonged to the Gilded Age industrialist Henry Clay Frick. He advises her to not only get a lawyer, but to get out of town.
Another scene takes place here in a later episode of The Undoing, when detectives Mendoza and O’Rourke come to question Grace’s father about her.
Photo by Niko Tavernise/HBO
Grace and Henry head to a beach house, which is actually located in East Marion, on the North Fork of Long Island east of Greenport. The house is at 5795 Rocky Point Road, the last home on the road before the Long Island Sound. It sits on a sort of promontory with glacial boulders on the shoreline. It was built originally, according to the Town of Southold, as a “life saving station which rescued countless people who otherwise would have been lost when their ships were wrecked off the sound shore. The United States Coast Guard was in charge of the station during World War II.”
Director Susanne Bier told Newsday, “I had [envisioned] that sort of house, very isolated, with an unlimited view of the sea, and it just kept coming back to me. I’d never been to Long Island before but when I saw the picture of it I had no doubt it was the right place. I’m very drawn to slightly melancholic settings.” The house is now privately owned but is available as an Airbnb rental for $1,150 a night. The house was also featured in the series “On the Sound.”
Photo by Niko Tavernise/HBO
After Jonathan’s arrest at the beach house, he is held at Rikers Island, New York City’s main jail complex. Although we see an aerial shot of the bridge and of Rikers Island in The Undoing, the close ups of Jonathan arriving at the jail by bus are shot at the former Queens House of Detention in Kew Gardens, Queens located at 126-02 82nd Avenue. This filming location was used previously in The Night Of and Mr. Robot to stand in as Rikers Island.
In real life, New York City Council has voted to close down Rikers Island by 2026, with plans to reduce the overall detainee population and rehouse the population in jails located in each borough. It’s important to note that Rikers Island is a jail not a prison, which means it houses those awaiting trail or serving sentences of one year or less.
Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman in The Undoing. Photo courtesy HBO
Jonathan is brought to his arraignment at 100 Centre Street, and The Undoing actually films the scenes at this building which is the location of the New York County Criminal Court and the Criminal Term of the New York County Supreme Court. In The Undoing, the court is referred to as the “Criminal Court of the City of New York.” Although the New York City criminal court usually tries misdemeanors and lesser offenses, it also holds the initial arraignment in serious cases.
Given the quick turnaround between Jonathan’s arrest and his hearing, in real life, he might have been held first at the jail nicknamed The Tombs attached to the courthouse. If he was not able to pay bail, as is the case in the The Undoing, he would likely then be transferred over to Rikers Island for the duration of the trial.
Jonathan’s public defender meets Grace at Donahue’s, a steakhouse at 845 Lexington Avenue. He tells her that Jonathan believes she will vouch for his innocence, but Grace tells him she cannot do so.
Donahue’s was also seen in the Showtime series, Billions.
Photo by Niko Tavernise/HBO
If you were wondering what office building with all the wood paneling was used for the filming location for lawyer Haley Fitzerald’s office, you won’t find it. This office is actually a set on Broadway Stages, a film studio in Greenpoint.
We saw this room in a tour of the studios in 2014 and have subsequently seen it appear in Gotham and other shows. On top of Broadway Stages is an amazing series of green roofs called Kingsland Wildflowers.
Photo: Niko Tavernise/HBO
After Jonathan is out on bail, he and Grace take a walk where she asks him if he knew about Elena’s paintings of her that were found in the basement of the art studio. They’re walking in Carl Schurz Park, located uptown along the East River just south of Gracie Mansion, the home of New York City’s mayors. In the background of the scene you can see Hell Gate Bridge, Randall’s Island, and the Triborough Bridge.
Carl Schurz Park was also recently seen as a filming location for Modern Love, the Amazon Studios production based on the New York Times column.
Photo: Warrick Page/HBO
In a dramatic season finale (a lot happens, but we agree with the tweeters — need more Edgar Ramirez! — Jonathan takes Henry on a wild “road trip” out of New York City and heads over the Wurts Street Bridge in Kingston, up in the Hudson Valley. The Bridge crosses over the Roundout Creek, which you can see on a boat tour from Kingston with the Hudson River Maritime Museum. Grace and her father take off from the Wall Street Heliport (also seen in Succession on HBO and the Wolf of Wall Street) and track Jonathan down, while the police follow on the highway. Grace rushes through the police on the bridge to save Henry and bring Jonathan down from the bridge.
Next, check out how The Crown filmed Princess Diana’s visit to NYC and the film locations from the show Grand Army on Netflix. See more from our popular column on filming locations.
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