Pseudo-NYC

Menken’s Department Store

If you’re writing fiction set in New York, you have three choices when it comes to landmarks and neighborhoods. You can take Wes Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums route and distort and obscure the city so that no landmarks are recognizable. You can be entirely realist and have your characters frequent real places and businesses familiar to real New Yorkers, à la Woody Allen. Or you can take a middle road, using the real city as a backdrop and inventing plausible—but bogus—New York institutions. This is a very popular way to handle the trickiness (and city politics) of fictional characters living in a place that is not only real, but also aggressively self-conscious. Gossip Girl’s students attend a school that is almost—but not quite—an actual Manhattan private high school. “Ugly” Betty Suarez works at an ersatz magazine that looks like Vogue if you squint. And Rachel Menken, one of Don Draper’s paramours in the first season of Mad Men, is trying to save her family’s department store, Bergdorf Goodman. Excuse me, I mean Menken’s. 

Rachel: Mr. Draper, our store is sixty years old. We share a wall with Tiffany’s.

(Mad Med, Season 1, Episode 1)

Bergdorf Goodman was founded by an Alsatian immigrant in 1899 as a tailor shop near Union Square; its current location opened 1928 on 5^th ave between 57^th and 58^th. Menken’s was founded by a Russian immigrant in 1900, and “shares a wall with Tiffany’s,” at the corner of 5^th and 57^th. Bergdorf suffered a period of tough sales in the 1950s and 1960s after the son of one of its original owners inherited the company in 1951. Rachel goes to Sterling Cooper because she, having inherited the company in 1960, is struggling to keep the store afloat. So Menken’s is Bergdorf Goodman— almost.

Constance Billard

(Image from here)

The Museum of the City of New York is at 103rd and 5^th, up near the top end of Museum Mile. It was founded in 1923, and the neo-Georgian building was finished in 1930. Given that the museum is dedicated to preserving and promoting the history of the real New York City, it’s a little ironic that the exterior of the building is used as the filming location for Constance Billard, a very fictional New York high school, and St. Jude’s, its equally fake brother school. 

(Image from here)

Constance’s students aim a little higher than the hallowed (and probably haunted) halls of Hudson University, despite apparently doing little more during the school day than hiking up their skirts and coronating each other with sparkly headbands. I kid! I kid because any given Constance student, fictional or not, could crush any of us normal people.

Constance is transparently based on the Nightingale-Bamford School on East 92^nd Street. Constance, at 93rd and Madison, is apparently Nightingale’s neighbor, which makes sense, although it must result in some pretty intense competition.

(Map adapted from Google Maps)

Hudson University

Hudson University is maybe my favorite fictional New York place. I mean, check out its description from Wikipedia:

“Hudson University is a fictional university alluded to in the TV shows The Cosby Show, Degrassi: the Next Generation, Law & Order, Tru Calling, Without a Trace, Castle and in the DC Comics universe…Hudson University is a composite of several colleges and universities located in New York City including Columbia University,Barnard College, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn College, College of Mount Saint Vincent, Hunter College, Lehman College, New York University, City College of New York, Queens College, Union Theological Seminary, Pace University and Fordham University, all of which have been used as filming locations.”

It’s basically the Morley cigarettes or the John Munch of higher education, except have you ever been to any of those schools in the “composite”? Aside from each institution being very different, that list includes pretty much every single college and university within city limits. Private schools, state schools, Ivy League, seminaries, art schools, Morningside Heights, Greenwich Village, Brooklyn, Queens… Hudson is a good school, wherever it is and whatever its classification— every time a dead body turns up on Law and Order, everyone’s shocked (though maybe they shouldn’t be). And apparently it’s appealing enough that Education-Portal.com had to (gently) break the news to college applicants nationwide that it is, sadly, fictional.

South Street Spaceport

(South Street Spaceport. Image from The Infosphere.)

Futurama is a lot of fun to watch as a modern-day New Yorker. The show’s writers don’t really need to be faithful to the actual geography of the city; Old New York is long buried, more or less intact, underneath the shiny modernist curves of New New York. Still, they insert tongue-in-cheek references to our city from time to time. One of the more obvious is South Street Spaceport, which takes its name from South Street Seaport.

(Wikimedia Commons)

South Street Seaport is now a touristy outdoor shopping mall sprinkled with educational historical sites à la Boston’s Faneuil Hall, but back in the day it was a functional port. In 2005, Fordham University published a thorough (if very Web 1.0) history of the port that is worth a look if you’re into old-timey ships, and the Futurama fans over at The Infosphere have compiled lists of spaceships docked at the Spaceport of the 3000s complete with those ships’ destinations for your perusal and enjoyment.

Mockingbird Heights

(Image from disparue.org)

Wes Anderson’s Manhattan is elongated: Royal introduces himself to Ari and Uzi at the 375^th street Y, which by my calculation would be have to be somewhere in White Plains. The filming locations chosen (mostly in Harlem) emphasize an almost infinite feel to New York, like the red-orange blocks go on forever.  You can smell the city: cigarette smoke and musty books and asphalt. There are no landmarks in this New York, only the run-down dignity of row-houses and the towering specters of Brutalist concrete high-rises in the distance. It’s kind of an amalgam of Upper Manhattan with any identifying features removed. When the narrator reveals that Margot keeps a secret studio apartment in Mockingbird Heights, it’s a bit of a shock to hear a neighborhood name (albeit a fictional one). 

So where is Mockingbird Heights? It shares a name with the town where the Munsters lived, but as it’s hard to imagine Margot willingly venturing into the suburbs, we can write that off as coincidence. New York City has a whole lot of neighborhoods with “Heights” in their names. Morningside, Hamilton , Hudson, and Washington Heights in Manhattan; Brooklyn, Prospect, Crown, and Dyker, and Greenwood Heights in Brooklyn; Jackson, Astoria, Cambria, and Wyckoff Heights in Queens; Kingsbridge, Morris, and University Heights in the Bronx; and Arden, Brighton, and Manor Heights in Staten Island. 

In keeping with the media-neglected state of the two boroughs, we can rule out Staten Island and Queens right off the bat. Sorry. And the Bronx, too, while we’re at it. Brooklyn’s Heights are lovely, but that’s a heck of a subway ride. Manhattan seems like the safest bet, especially since its Heights are contiguous. 

(Manhattan’s Heights. Map adapted from openstreetmap.org.)

(The “House on Archer Avenue,” via Google Street View)

The house on Archer Avenue is, in real life, located in Hamilton Heights, which is (depending on who you ask) either a part of Harlem or its own self-contained neighborhood. Hamilton Heights was built for upper-middle-class black families, and as such is full of beautiful old brownstones that have been for the most part ignored by the Manhattan real estate steamroller. It’s a pretty neighborhood, but my money’s on Morningside Heights being Anderson’s inspiration for Mockingbird Heights, for one big reason: Morningside Heights is home to Columbia University and many of its attendant intellectuals. Despite the constant influx of 18-year-olds, Morningside’s retained some of the crusty beatnik residue of the earlier half of the century. She’d have to avoid the undergrads, sure, but Margot would fit right in, maybe wearing a black turtleneck and reading in the back of Danish Pastry House or carrying on an affair with a professor in some obscure department at the University. 

(Morningside Heights, down Amsterdam Ave. Originally from en.wikipedia; description page is/was here.)

For more about the production of The Royal Tenebaums, go here.