While new ABC TV drama-horror series “666 Park Avenue” may be based on New York’s Upper East Side, its pilot episode features interior scenes filmed here in Brooklyn Heights. The show—which launches Sunday at 10 p.m.—stars “Lost’s” Terry O’Quinn and Vanessa Williams, and is based on the Gabriella Pierce novel. It follows couple Gavin and Olivia Doran, owners of UES hotel The Drake, whose corridors and upscale tenants are haunted by a wicked force.
In early August, the main floor of Brooklyn’s iconic mid-1800s Borough Hall was utilized for a scene that we’ll see in the show, with men decked in tuxedos and women in formal evening dress. The Wall Street Journal reports that the hall acts as a stand-in for the mansion of a fictional New York mayor, while the show “showcases some of the city’s most impressive, and at times forbidding, classic architecture.”
Dan Davis, production designer for “666 Park Avenue,” says, “It’s the mythical New York everyone dreams about but no one who lives here really knows.” The series’ primary exterior shots, meanwhile, are filmed at the Ansonia, on Broadway between 73rd and 74th streets. Other NYC locations you’ll see in the series include The Drake’s “secret room” in the basement of the Church of the Intercession at West 155th Street in Washington Heights. The nearby Hispanic Society of America, a 1904 Beaux-Arts library and museum on Audubon Terrace, will also appear; as well as the Flatiron Building.
