School may be out for the summer in most places but the students of New York’s illustrious (yet fictional) Constance Billard School for Girls/St. Jude’s School for Boys have just returned to class for the first time in almost a decade thanks to HBO Max’s recent “Gossip Girl” reboot, which debuted July 8. (New episodes drop each Thursday.) And you know what that means! Your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite is back – with a vengeance! Sleeker, sexier and all-around more risqué, this is certainly not your grandmother’s “Gossip Girl.”
As creator Josh Safran, who also executive produced and has an “encyclopedic brain” of the original (which is available on the streamer, as well), told Interview Magazine, “It’s HBO Max, so we don’t have restrictions on nudity or sexuality, or language.” That much is obvious. While the OG series famously angered the Parents Television Council and other media watchdog groups, the reboot manages to push the envelope even further! Headed up by Queen Bee Julien Calloway (Jordan Alexander), the latest crop of Constance Billard/St. Jude’s pupils have far more money (Julien’s well-appointed closet rivals the size of most Manhattan apartments!), partake of far more adult extracurricular activities (Julien and friends spend virtually every night knocking back martini after martini with nary an ID in sight) and seem to have even less parental supervision than their predecessors.
In another major deviation from the 2007 series, while the identity of the titular tea spiller is one secret the original Gossip Girl would never tell, the veil is lifted right off the bat in the reboot. This time it’s the Constance Billard/St. Jude’s teachers, headed up by English instructor Kate Keller (Tavi Gevinson, whom Vogue dubbed “the original influencer”), dropping the dirt on the self-absorbed student body.
Thankfully Kristen Bell has reprised her role as the series’ honeyed-voiced narrator. Another holdover? The spot portraying the exterior of Constance Billard/St. Jude’s. Well, one of them, at least. Three different locations were actually utilized to represent the campus on the original, only one of which was actually on the Upper East Side.
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Image Credit: Warner Bros. Television The gorgeous Georgian-style Synod of Bishops of The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia at 75 E. 93rd St. (which also masked as The Reardon School on “The Undoing”) was used for most courtyard shots. About ten miles south, Brooklyn’s Packer Collegiate Institute was featured heavily as Constance Billard/St. Jude’s during season two. But the most recognizable of the bunch is the Museum of the City of New York in East Harlem (pictured above in a still from the original series), which appeared in virtually all establishing shots of the campus throughout Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester) and the gang’s high school years. It is that location that is currently being utilized on the reboot.
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Image Credit: Beyond My Ken Located at the northern end of Museum Mile at 1220 5th Ave., the Museum of the City of New York was the brainchild of writer/historian Henry Collins Brown. It was originally founded in 1923 at Archibald Gracie Mansion in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood, which now serves as the home of the city’s mayor. Construction on the museum’s current location, a much larger Georgian Colonial-Revival monolith designed by architect Joseph H. Freedlander, began in 1929 on a plot of land donated by the city. The stately building was finally completed in 1932 thanks to $2 million in funding raised by local citizens and the site opened to the public on January 11 of that year.
Today, the site boasts four floors containing 750,000 pieces of ephemera concerning New York’s vibrant and vast history, as well as other bits of Americana. Just a few of the items in the collection include several of playwright Eugene O’Neill’s handwritten manuscripts, more than 400 of photographer Jacob Riis’ glass negatives and a suit worn to George Washington’s inaugural ball. There’s also a New York-themed gift shop on the premises and a restaurant known as Amy’s Bread at Chalsty’s Cafe. The museum is currently open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday through Sunday. Admission is $20 for adults, $14 for seniors and students, while ages 19 and under are free.
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Image Credit: HBO Max In deciding on a spot to represent Constance Billard/St. Jude’s on the reboot , the production team sought a familiar location to serve as a touchstone for fans of the original, a way to bridge the old series with the new. According to production designer Ola Maslik, of the three locales utilized on the OG “G.G”, The Museum of the City of New York’s beautiful and classical architecture as well as its location directly across the street from Central Park made it the obvious choice.
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Image Credit: HBO Max The site’s stately brick and marble façade also aligned perfectly with the creative vision Maslik had conceived for the school interiors, which are all part of an elaborate set. For their design, Ola, who was also behind the looks of “Madam Secretary” and “How to Make It in America,” scrutinized old institutional architecture around New York City. Though most private schools had been modernized and no longer had the feel the team was seeking, many governmental buildings did and provided the model for Constance Billard/St. Jude’s old-meets-new aesthetic.
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Image Credit: HBO Max Taking up an entire soundstage, the massive school set was built as a square, with one long contiguous hallway wrapped around a central glass courtyard. Branching off from the hall are the teachers’ lounge, stairways and bathrooms. The layout, which mimics that of actual school buildings, allows the actors plenty of space to walk and move during scenes.
The Constance Billard/St. Jude’s interiors were also given a universal feel so that when a storyline requires the series to branch out beyond the set, the production team is easily able to find real-world locations to seamlessly mesh with the studio build.
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Image Credit: Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group The two “Gossip Girl” series are hardly the only productions to make use of The Museum of the City of New York. In 2007, the locale popped up as Columbia University in the musical “Across the Universe.”
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Image Credit: NBCUniversal Television In the season five episode of “30 Rock” titled “TGS Hates Women,” the museum once again plays a school, this time the private academy where Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) confronts his teen nemesis, Kaylee Hooper (Chloë Grace Moretz).
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Image Credit: Lionsgate Entertainment It plays The Brigham School in the 2013 drama “NYC Underground.”
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Image Credit: CBS Media Ventures And Henry McCord (Tim Daly) shops in the museum’s gift shop with his sister, Maureen (Kate Burton), and daughter, Alison (Kathrine Herzer), in the season four episode of “Madam Secretary” titled “The Unnamed.”