Hollywood seems to be obsessed with true con artist sagas as of late. Hulu’s most recent offering, “The Dropout,” chronicling the misdeeds of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, hit the streamer today. It comes on the heels of two new Netflix shows, “The Tinder Swindler,” about the scams of online lothario Simon Leviev, and “Inventing Anna,” a fictionalized retelling of the story of grifter Anna Delvey (Julia Garner) – real name Anna Sorokin – a twenty-something who swindled her way across New York, conning hotels, restaurants and the city’s upper echelon out of hundreds of thousands of dollars until finally landing herself in prison in 2017. As summed up by New York Times reporter Emily Palmer, evidence presented at Delvey’s month-long trial “showed she stole a private jet and bilked banks, hotels and associates out of about $200,000. She did all of this while attempting to secure a $25 million loan from a hedge fund to create an exclusive arts club. Swindling her way into a life of luxury, Sorokin deceived Manhattan’s elite into believing she was a German heiress worth 60 million euros. In reality, she had no real wealth, college degree or business experience. She wasn’t even German.”
The Shonda Rhimes-backed series, based upon journalist Jessica Pressler’s 2018 New York magazine piece titled “Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It,” debuted in mid-February and is still ranking in the platform’s Top Ten today, though it hasn’t exactly been well-received by viewers or critics. Harshly panned by publications ranging from Vogue to Vox to Salon, “Inventing Anna” is currently earning a dismal 33% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. The criticism is not exactly unwarranted considering the nine-episode show drags on about three episodes too long, boasts few likable characters and demonizes the majority of Anna’s victims, while seemingly making a hero of the con woman at its center with no real explanation as to why.
The series also seems to play as fast and loose with the facts as Anna herself, a convention alluded to in text appearing at the beginning of each episode cheekily stating, “This story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are totally made up.” The “totally made up parts” aren’t specified, leaving it up to the audience to distinguish fact from fiction. But if any of Anna’s post-arrest interviews are to be believed, her actual persona seems very far removed from the sophisticated, business-savvy dynamo presented onscreen – as does the deck she created to garner investors for her arts club, which looks more like a Pinterest-y conglomeration of stock images in real life than the sleekly professional booklet featured in episode three.
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Fotografiska New York
Image Credit: ajay_suresh/Wikipedia One area in which “Inventing Anna” does stick close to the truth is its filming locations. The production team did actually travel to Marrakesh to shoot at La Mamounia, the hotel where Delvey conned friend Rachel Williams into footing a $62,000 room and incidentals bill in real life. The scenes taking place in Germany were, indeed, lensed on location in and around Berlin. And 281 Park Avenue South, the stunning Gothic building Anna sets her sights on to house her private arts club, plays itself on the series.
Towering above the corner of Park Ave. S. and E. 22nd St. in New York’s Gramercy Park area, the striking property, also known as the Church Missions House, was designed by architects R.W. Gibson and E.J.N. Stent. Boasting six stories and between 33,600 to 45,000 square feet of space depending on which publication you happen to be reading, the structure is a Flemish-inspired monolith of granite and Indiana limestone.
Commissioned by the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1892, construction on the $370,000 building was made possible thanks to large donations from Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. Pierpont Morgan and W. Bayard Cutting. Upon its completion in 1894, the site was mainly comprised of offices for church executives and staff and utilized as a “center for the dissemination of Christian endeavors,” according to The New York Times.
By 1963, the Missionary Society had outgrown the bespoke building and commissioned a newer, larger facility to be built. 281 Park Ave. was subsequently sold to the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agency. When the FPWA moved out in 2014, the Church Missions House was put on the market once again, ultimately sold to Aby Rosen of RFR Realty for $50 million and put up for lease.
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Image Credit: Fotografiska It was at that time that Anna Delvey became interested in the structure, which is both a New York City Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. She wasn’t the only one, though. Jan Broman, co-founder of the Fotografiska photography museum in Sweden, had been contemplating opening a second location in the Big Apple. While cruising the city in a cab in 2015, fate intervened. According to Forbes, “As the taxicab rolled down Park Avenue, his wife pointed out the window and said, ‘That’s your building.’” He took a tour of the location the next day and, much to Delvey’s chagrin, made a deal to lease all six floors. After several years of renovations and redesigns, Fotografiska opened in December 2019.
Wondering what Fotografiska is exactly? You’re not the only one. In a 2019 article, Untapped Cities explained, “Inside the historic space, Fotografiska will mix art, food and social engagement to encourage creativity and provide a personal yet dynamic shared experience.” Ironically, the description does not sound too far off from the private club Delvey spent years unsuccessfully trying to get off the ground. Unlike Anna, though, Broman had no intention of reserving the site solely for Manhattan’s one-percenters. Instead, Fotografiska is open to the public daily, accessible for the marginal cost of $26 a person.
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Image Credit: Fotografiska Today, the building is a stunning array of gorgeous spaces, the likes of which Delvey could only have dreamed about. The museum’s lower level consists of a gift shop/bookstore, a café and a bar. The latter, a darkly-lit lounge housed inside the Church Missions House’s former chapel, retains many original design elements, including a dramatic vaulted ceiling that towers 20 feet over the wooden floors below.
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Image Credit: Adrian Gaut, Verōnika Up until last fall, Fotografiska’s second level was home to the gorgeous Verōnika restaurant, which shuttered unexpectedly in September. The closure was a sad loss for the city being that Steve Cuozzo of the New York Post declared the dazzling eatery, “The finest transformation of a historic, private space into a venue for public consumption — namely, food consumption — since Grand Central Terminal’s Campbell Apartment two decades ago.”
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Image Credit: Fotografiska The museum’s middle levels consist of exhibit and gallery halls, capped by a sixth-floor event space (pictured above) featuring exposed brick walls, industrial beamed ceilings and windows overlooking the busy streets of Gramercy Park below.
All in all, it’s a glorious structure, so it is no wonder it piqued Delvey’s interest.
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Image Credit: Fotografiska 281 Park Ave. makes its first “Inventing Anna” appearance in episode three, titled “Two Birds, One Throne.” Delvey initially scopes out the building after learning of its availability while eavesdropping on Nora Radford (Kate Burton) and her friends during a shopping venture at Bergdorf Goodman. One look at the impressive structure and she is suitably awed. She spends the rest of the series fixated on transforming the site into her private club, which she plans to dub the “Anna Delvey Foundation,” or “ADF.”
In the episode that follows, “A Wolf in Chic Clothing,” the swindler takes potential board members and investors on a tour of the building and says of her vision, “The Anna Delvey Foundation is a private club, but it’s also a dynamic visual arts center. I want it to be a place for people with taste, a step beyond the VIP room. When you’re in, you know you’re special, exclusive. Not just one big space, I want it to be a series of small cozy lounges with private butlers.” Along with gallery areas, she also envisions the foundation boasting two floors of “luxurious, curated” hotel rooms, a juice bar, a German bakery and three restaurants – “all different, one of them doesn’t have to be another Nobu, but I wouldn’t mind.”
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Image Credit: Netflix Because Fotografiska is a working museum, only the exterior was available for use in “Inventing Anna.” As such, the locations team had to search elsewhere for a suitable alternative spot to shoot interior scenes. Production designer Henry Dunn told Tudum, “We went and looked all over Manhattan [at] buildings being redone, buildings that were being remodeled . . . We talked about it in a million different variations before [we thought,] ‘Why don’t we go out to one of the sort of fake gothic mansions that were built with pre-Wall Street crash money between the 1880s and the 1920s.’”
They wound up finding exactly what they were seeking at Hempstead House, a historic property located at 127 Middle Neck Rd. in Sands Point on Long Island’s Gold Coast. The magnificent structure, designed by the Hunt & Hunt architecture firm in 1912, is stunning both inside and out and, as such, has become a popular wedding venue and filming location.
Boasting over 50,000 square feet of space, the estate originally belonged to financier Howard Gould (son of notorious robber baron Jay Gould) and his wife, Katherine Clemmons, but today is part of the 216-acre Sands Point Preserve park.
Despite the scaffolding and plastic tarping brought in by the “Inventing Anna” production team to give the place the appearance of being vacant and under construction, its glorious architectural detailing still manages to shine through on the show. The estate’s gothic archways, vaulted ceilings and exquisite woodwork are truly a sight to behold! And, much like Fotografiska, the Hempstead House is typically open to the public for tours, though visits have been temporarily halted due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In the meantime, interested parties can check out extensive imagery of the grand mansion on the Scouting New York website.