Where is Boardwalk Empire filmed? The boardwalk itself was built from scratch in a parking lot
HBO needed 1920s Atlantic City and decided not to shoot in Atlantic City. Here's the Brooklyn lot where the boardwalk actually stood, what it cost, and how much of what you see on screen was physically there.
The show is set in Atlantic City and almost never went to Atlantic City. The boardwalk you see in every establishing shot stood for four years on a vacant lot in north Brooklyn.
HBO built it in Greenpoint, on an empty parking lot near the corner of Commercial and Clay Streets, a few blocks from the East River. The run of boardwalk was 300 feet long, with full period facades — the Ritz-Carlton where Nucky Thompson keeps his suite, the storefronts, the railings. Production designer Bob Shaw's crew put it up for the pilot, and it was the first outdoor standing set constructed in New York City since the local film industry packed up in the 1910s. Google Street View caught it mid-build before the production screened it off.
The money
Martin Scorsese directed the pilot and wanted a real boardwalk rather than a green-screen floor. That decision is a large share of why the episode cost $18 million, against a series average of roughly $5 million per episode afterward. The boardwalk alone accounted for about $5 million of it.
Scorsese had the standing to insist the thing get built, and it got built.
New Jersey never had a serious shot at the production. New York's film tax credit was the deciding factor, and the show went on to employ hundreds of New Yorkers across its first season alone.
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What was real and what wasn't
About ten feet. That's roughly how far the practical set extended past the boardwalk railing into the sand. Everything beyond it — the beach, the surf, the piers, the crowds in the middle distance — was added later. The blue screen behind it was mounted on a 40-foot tower of stacked shipping crates that walled off the entire ocean side of the lot.
The shooting pattern was fixed: two days per episode on the Greenpoint boardwalk, ten days everywhere else.
Where everywhere else was
Steiner Studios at the Brooklyn Navy Yard served as the production base, including the two-story Onyx Club built for the later seasons. The rest of Atlantic City was assembled out of real New York buildings:
- Commandant's House, Vinegar Hill — Nucky's house interiors, in a residence designed around 1805 by Charles Bulfinch.
- Veterans Room, Park Avenue Armory — the Commodore's house in seasons 1 and 2, decorated by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Stanford White.
- Montauk Club, Park Slope — Lolly Steinman's casino, in a Venetian-palazzo-styled clubhouse.
- Sylvan Terrace, Washington Heights — the row of houses used as "whore row."
- Poppenhusen Institute, College Point, Queens — the Women's Temperance League hall.
- 387 St. Paul's Avenue, Staten Island — a 24-room Queen Anne mansion from 1887, whose owners watched their living room be redressed as a dining room.
- Rockaway boardwalk, Queens — a second, separate boardwalk built for the 1884 and 1897 flashbacks in season 4.
Interiors were chosen for original moldings and tin ceilings, then dressed; a Williamsburg clothing store became a speakeasy. Visual effects mostly went on removing window air conditioners.
The set survived being blown up. On August 16, 2012, the production staged a controlled explosion on the Greenpoint boardwalk in front of a crowd of neighborhood spectators.
Boardwalk Empire ran five seasons and 56 episodes on HBO from 2010 to 2014, created by Terence Winter. The Greenpoint lot was decommissioned after the series wrapped, and there is nothing to visit there now.
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