Sweet baby Jesus and the grown one, too, the season two finale of the beloved ABC mockuseries “Abbott Elementary,” which aired earlier this week, certainly proved monumental! Capping off two fun-filled years with the staff and students at Philadelphia’s fictional Willard R. Abbott Elementary School, the episode not only sees ardently optimistic second-grade teacher Janine Teagues (Quinta Brunson, who also created the show) and substitute-turned-educator Gregory Eddie (Tyler James Williams) finally admit their feelings for each other, but it marks the first time that the cast and crew left their Los Angeles home base to film on location in the City of Brotherly Love!
Revered for its charming characters, heartwarming storylines and hilarious take on the educational system, the runaway hit and awards show darling debuted in late 2021 to much fanfare and the accolades haven’t stopped since! With art truly imitating life, Brunson, a West Philadelphia native, was inspired to create the “Office”-esque series in large part thanks to her mother, Norma Jean, who worked as a kindergarten teacher for over four decades. The actress explained to Philly Voice, “I wanted to develop a show, and I always feel like you should write what you know. I got to see behind the veil because I was with my mom in the morning and at night, and I was in her kindergarten class all the time.” Quinta even based the character of seasoned teacher Barbara Howard (played to regal perfection by Sheryl Lee Ralph) upon Norma Jean.
While Brunson may have come by her knowledge of the educational field naturally giving “Abbott Elementary” a thoroughly authentic provenance and feel, the series’ locations are anything but, with Los Angeles instead stepping in to mask as the City of Brotherly Love onscreen.
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Image Credit: Courtesy of Mike the Fanboy The show’s central locale, Willard R. Abbott School, is actually a mash-up of two different SoCal spots. The pilot episode was filmed at Vermont Avenue Elementary at 1435 W. 27th St. in L.A.’s Adams-Normandie neighborhood. That site is still sometimes featured in on-location scenes involving Abbott’s parking lot and playground. But once the series was picked up by ABC, a façade modeled after Vermont Avenue’s rear side was constructed on the New York Street portion of the Warner Bros. Studio backlot in Burbank. It is that façade (pictured above courtesy of the Mike the Fanboy website) that is most often featured on the show. Interiors are also filmed on a set built at Warner Bros.
While the characters are rarely shown outside of the school setting, the season one finale, titled “Zoo Balloon,” sees Janine, her students and fellow teachers take a field trip to what is purported to be the Philadelphia Zoo. Cast and crew did not cross state lines to shoot the episode, though. Instead, Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge masqueraded as the wildlife park. But for the season two finale, which also centers around a field trip, the “Abbott” team finally made their way to Philadelphia, descending upon the famed Franklin Institute, where the bulk of the episode, aptly titled “Franklin Institute,” takes place.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt Fostering a mission to “inspire a passion for learning about science and technology,” the celebrated museum was originally founded as The Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts by engineer Samuel Vaughan Merrick and geologist William H. Keating in 1824. Initially housed at 15 S. 7th St. (which, up until last year, was the site of the now-shuttered Philadelphia History Museum at The Atwater Kent), the facility moved to its current location, a towering Classical Beaux Arts building at 222 N. 20th St. in the Logan Square neighborhood, in 1934.
Spanning four stories and over 400,000 square feet of exhibit and auditorium space, the handsome structure, fashioned out of Indiana limestone and Milford pink granite, was designed by celebrated local architect John T. Windrim, a Fellow of the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects who was also responsible for the Lincoln-Liberty Building and the Grays Road Recreation Center.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt Inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, the museum’s entrance comprises a massive Benjamin Franklin National Memorial, also designed by Windrim and added to the premises in 1938. Featuring a 20-foot statue of the facility’s namesake sculpted by James Earle Fraser out of white Seravezza marble centered in an elaborate rotunda, the space stretches 82 feet in diameter and is capped by a self-supporting domed ceiling weighing a whopping 1,600 tons!
Adored by children and adults alike, The Franklin Institute, as the official website notes, is the “most visited museum in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and a top-five tourist destination in the City of Philadelphia.” Deemed a “Wonderland of Science,” the site’s wide array of extensive hands-on exhibits include a four-story Foucault pendulum, an 18-foot Neural Network climb, a planetarium, a train factory complete with a Baldwin 60000 steam locomotive, and a 5,000-square-foot interactive Giant Heart, many of which appear on “Abbott Elementary.”
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt In “Franklin Institute,” Janine, Gregory and the rest of the Abbott troop attend an overnight field trip at the museum. Though nearly the entire episode takes place on the premises, filming at the facility was completed over the course of just one day this past February.
The Franklin Institute is one of the state’s most popular field trip destinations IRL, too, hosting “more school visits than anyone else in Pennsylvania,” as president and CEO Larry Dubinksi told Philly Voice. Indeed, even Bronson visited the landmark site as a child. The actress recently espoused on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, “It’s like our Smithsonian. And that’s where you go on your field trips. And I was just over the moon that they let us come film there.”
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Image Credit: ABC The episode makes copious use of the Institute, capturing footage throughout, most prominently in and around the famous Giant Heart, which stands two stories and is appropriately sized for a person measuring 220 feet tall. It is outside of the gargantuan piece that Gregory and Janine rather appropriately have a heart-to-heart conversation, ultimately divulging their feelings for one another. And yes, the rhythmic heartbeat heard in the background is authentic to the exhibit.
Up until 2020, kids could make like the Abbott gang by attending an overnight “Camp-In” at the museum, which let “mini-scientists semi-loose in its hallowed halls, giant heart and permanent exhibits,” as detailed by the Mommy Nearest blog. Sadly, that event seems to have been halted, like so many others, due to the pandemic.
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Image Credit: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures “Abbott Elementary” is not the first big-name production to feature the museum. The Franklin Institute also famously appears in the 2004 adventure classic “National Treasure” as the spot where Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) solves an Ottendorf cipher, thanks to some help from “Museum Kid” (Yves Beneche) and the Silence Dogood letters.
I have some bad news for fans hoping to have their own “National Treasure” moment at the facility – the famous series of letters can’t actually be found on the premises in real life. Written by Franklin at the age of 16 under a fake name and persona and published by the New-England Courant beginning in 1722, the original 14 epistles have been lost to the ages, though their contents are extensively chronicled in print and online.
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Image Credit: Lindsay Blake for Dirt For the shoot, the “National Treasure” production team created prop replicas of the letters and displayed them inside large wooden and glass cases positioned in between open columned spaces in the rotunda, just to the side of the Franklin statue.
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Image Credit: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures -
Image Credit: Google As purported onscreen, the spot where Riley waits for Museum Kid in the scene is located directly across the street from The Franklin Institute at the Aero Memorial in Aviator Park.
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Image Credit: NBC Ian Price (Steven Pasquale) also attends a gala in honor of Dr. Vanessa Young (Phylicia Rashad) at The Franklin Institute in the season one episode of the short-lived NBC series “Do No Harm” titled “Me Likey.”