Where the Friends Apartment Building in New York

Connected September 22, 1994, the TV show Friends premiered on NBC. Ventilation 10 seasons, IT was consistently one of the near common shows on television, and afterwards decades of syndication, one of the most popular in history. And for a multiplication of young 20-somethings, it formed their views of, and in many ways echoic their experience of, what their lives were supposed to live like. While the show was shot in Burbank, Golden State, all but all it was supposed to take out place in Greenwich Village, where the apartments of all of its main characters were set. Thus it likewise shaped a generation's views of what living in Greenwich Village, even off if your problem was a jape and you were broke, was like. In honor of the show's 25th anniversary, we have a look at the places where Ross, Rachel, Pentad, Joey, Monica, and Chandler were theoretic to have lived, and how the Television set reality Friends created lined up (or didn't) with realism.

Photo by Ajay Suresh on Flickr

The Champions apartment building, 90 Bedford Street

The spot in Greenwich Village nigh associated with Friends, and where crowds of tourists behind equal seen taking pictures entirely hours of all daytime, is the apartment house at 90 Bedford Street. Settled connected the corner of Plantation Street, it's where at one time or another all six of the gang lived (Ross shortly with Raymond Thornton Chandler and Joey, and Cinque with Monica before the show began and Rachel moved in). Some elements of the building perform actually line up with what is seen on the show, piece others are a morsel more off base.

Like in the display, this is a walk-up apartment building, with residential uses above the ground level and commercial infinite on the first floor, where the crew's favorite hangout, 'Centrical Perk,' was supposed to be located.

Joey and Chandler's apartment

The actual 90 Bedford Street was constructed in 1898-99 and is an 'noncurrent law' tenement, too sometimes referred to as a 'dumbbell' tenement. This is because the law at the time required passing nominal cut-out air shafts on the buildings to allow a window and some 'air' in every bedroom, which often ready-made the buildings look similar dumbbells when viewed from above. The required air shafts were typically so narrow though that you could literally reach out and sting your arm through the window of an adjacent tenement (or worsened, face a lacuna fence in of an adjacent building just a few inches away if there was no mirroring indentation).

This lines up nicely with how Joey's (and briefly Rachel's) bedroom faces the apartment of 'Morning Guy' flop across the constricting air shaft, who serenades Joey (and much to her chagrin, Rachel) with a rousing bout of "Morning's Here!" from each one a.m.

The modest proportions of Joey and Raymond Thornton Chandler's apartment, with the combined kitchen/live room, is also not wildly off-base for a tenement house like this, though one mightiness argue that a mostly out-of-work actor and a whatever-it-is-Chandler-does-for-a-living-guy would be unlikely to give even that apartment in the West Village.

All the same, it's non arsenic unrealistic as you might think for the time. Older multi-unit buildings similar this typically fell under New York Metropolis rent stabilization rules, which only allowed for very small annual or bi-annual rent increases from the metre the rules were established in 1947 when this apartment was likely rattling cheap. Did landlords get around this in sopranino-demand areas like Greenwich Greenwich Village, and oft take off apartments from the rent stabilisation system, legally or other than? Yes, simply many did not, and under the old rules, flat when someone moved out, solely a modest increase in the charter was allowed for the new rent-stabilized tenant, thus providing little incentive to try to thrust out long-standing tenants, and keeping rents deficient.

Only in 1993, the New House of York Res publica Legislature passed a series of changes to the rent regulating laws that allowed landlords to legally dramatically increase rents on stable apartments, especially once a tenant stirred knocked out, and made it much easier to legally take apartments out of the rent regulation system and remove the rent increase caps. It's non phantasmagoric to think that Joey and Chandler might have moved in before those rules were changed in late 1993, getting in under the wire to secure and keep out an affordable snag-stabilized apartment.

Monica and Rachel's apartment

Monica and Rachel's apartment (formerly Monica and Phoebe's, briefly Joey and Chandler's, and finally Monica and Chandler's) is often characterized American Samoa being a wildly unrealistic portrayal of the kind of flat these sorts of folks could afford, or that would even be. While much of that criticism is justified, there are a surprising number of things nearly the flat that exercise hew about reality, or leastwise a possible reality.

No tenement flat would have the sprawling, rambling layout of Monica and Rachel's, nor a coldcock-to-cap window with a terrace. That same, it's a not-unrealistic portrayal of another kind of usually-found flat in older buildings in Greenwich Settlement, the studio atelier. These apartments, added on top of 19th century walk of life-up human action buildings (usually rowhouses which had been carved upfield into apartments) in the early 20th 100, do actually tend to look like Monica and Rachel's apartment, with an open, loft-like place, sloped floor-to-cap industrial casement windows often set back from the edge of the building (which, conceivably, could accommodate the typecast of terrace of the girls' apartment). Although it's virtually unheard of to have this rather apartment atop a tenement ilk 90 Bedford Street, scores of other older walk-up apartment buildings in the unmediated vicinity do.

Of course, the other oft-criticized element of Monica and Rachel's apartment is that a under chef and a waitress/next-to-last buyer at Bloomingdales could ne'er get under one's skin or afford an apartment like that in Greenwich Village. But here A well, reality and TV may non be as misaligned as some English hawthorn reflexively assume.

The show does at least offer the account that the apartment was Monica's grandmother's and that when she passed inaccurate, Monica inherited information technology. There are elements of truth and fiction to this account, some of information technology (perhaps coincidently) rooted in some complex historical realism.

New York's rent and housing Pentateuch arrange in point of fact grant grandchildren succession rights to rent-stabilized apartments (which this one would have to have been for Monica and Rachel to afford), and if her grannie had been living there for several decades, the rent could have been quite an reasonable. However, in order to qualify for ecological succession rights (i.e. the ability to stay in a rent-stable apartment and at the existing rent-stabilized rent), a grandchild would need to record that they had been living there as their primary residence along with the lessee (the grandparent) for some sentence before they died, usually leastwise a year. The show never really addresses whether or not this is the type, but IT's not the most unrealistic scenario that Monica could have lived with her elderly or seedy grandmother before her death, or convinced her landlord that she had.

But there's another curious component of potential historic world to this scenario. 90 Bedford Street was designed by Schneider and Herter architects, both New York architects known in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for designing tenements, apartment buildings, factories, and synagogues, typically for German-Jewish clients like themselves, mostly on the Lower Due east Side of meat. As was often the case at this time, builders (specially of tenements) cared-for market their buildings towards those of a similar heathen background, and tenements of Schneider and Herter were oft marketed to Soul immigrants.

Ross and Monica were supposed to be Jewish, so their gran likely was as healed. And Geller is a German name. So might she, or even her parents surgery family, have been among the waves of Jewish immigrants who came to New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and been one of the early occupants of this tenement, impermanent a valued apartment on from one propagation to the next? It's actually not the nearly unconvincing of scenarios.

Simply one factor producers clearly got wrong were the stairs and hallways of the construction. An old legal philosophy tenement house would have very, selfsame narrow steps and hallways (peculiarly this one; 90 Bedford Street is, at its very widest, entirely a little over 25 feet, As it replaced a small rowhouse previously on the land site). In fact, typically old law tenement house hallways leave just enough elbow room for two people to squeeze sometime all other, as, like everything about these buildings, they were built with the minimal amenities legally necessary or required, to house the poorest New Yorkers. It definitely would not offer enough room for three people to lie i around and eat cheesecake off the floor, surgery for Danny (the Abominable snowman) to Host a party thither.

And Monica and Rachel and Joey and Raymond Chandler switching apartments over a bet? If those were rent-stabilized apartments, that could definitely be grounds for eviction.

Photo past Padraic Ryan happening Wikimedia

Ross' apartments

For the first several seasons of the show, Nellie Tayloe Ros is shown to live at Washington Square Village, the modernist superblock of apartments collective by Robert Moses in the late 1950s just south of Capital of the United States Quadrate Park. Ross' flat is relatively modern and roomy (for an unfancy Manhattan apartment), which is certainly not unrealistic for the real-life location.

What's less earthy is that in the 1960s, this gigantic thickening of apartments was taken terminated by New House of York University, who started placing module in the units whenever they would get along available (and finally combine units into larger and larger "tiptop units" to attract big-name faculty). So while many old-time remained in the complex for years, by the 1994 premiere of Friends these non-NYU tenants were already a relatively infinitesimal minority and would have to have lived in their unit before NYU took over in the 1960s. Perhaps Ross had another grandparent World Health Organization was an NYU faculty member from whom he had embezzled over the apartment?

Somewhat ironically, in later seasons, subsequently his divorce from Emily and losing his Washington Square Village Apartment, Ross does teach for a while at NYU; peradventur they should have reversed the order of those storylines.

Ross' later residence, when he takes over "Ugly Naked Guy's" place, is even more full of notable paradoxes and contradictions. The flat appears to be across a rear courtyard from Monica and Rachel's, founded upon the views which show other buildings wrapping around theirs as they look out their huge window towards the other apartment. This "across the courtyard" theory is buttressed by the installment where the gang, wondering if ugly naked guy is late or just quiescency, fashion a long "poking device" which they aim through their windowpane across the style and into his, to see how he reacts ("he's alive!" shouts Phoebe, in mock-1950s B-movie fury).

Only the establishing exterior shots used before scenes in Ross' apartment distinctly show the camera moving from 90 Bedford Street across the street to 17 Grove Street. Not sole does that make the wrap-around rear court take i nonsensical, but as quaintly-scaled as Grove Street is, it would have to be one heckuva titan poking gimmick to not only make it crossways the street but for steady six people to make up able-bodied to head information technology appropriately to reach its target.

IT should be noted that 17 Plantation Street, like 90 Bedford Street, is an old law tenement of a similar boob shape, dating to 1891. This makes Betsy Ross (and ugly nude guy's) liberally proportioned flat, with biggish picture windows, a bit of a fantasise. So besides are the ample hallways of the building and the restored progressive doors of the apartments (remember when Joey went searching the building for "hot girl's" apartment and kept coming back to Ross'?). These would be more normal of a converted loft construction, which is certainly democratic in the West Village. Just 17 Grove Street is definitely not one of them.

5 Morton Street, map data ©2019 Google

Phoebe's Apartment

Last, Phoebe (and awhile Rachel) lived at 5 Morton Street, flat numerate 14 (as per the address Phoebe gave over the ring to the jest at who left over his telephone set in Fundamental Pick up for him to retrieve it from her). Incredibly, this real-life address is all of about deuce blocks from where the other five Friends lived.

Like Monica, Phoebe apparently got her amazingly well-located flat through her grandmother (both a slick explanation and an unbelievable coincidence and slash of luck). The like the other three buildings, 5 Ferdinand Joseph La Menthe Morton is also a tenement, albeit an even older one, dating to 1871. This makes this a "pre-law" tenement, which means it was built before even those implausibly modest 'experienced laws' obligatory the little air shaft carve up-outs for windows. When 5 Morton Street was built, it had no inner air shafts operating room indoor plumbing; in that location were originally two apartments per floor, each likely housing one operating theatre more very ample, multi-generational families and possibly borders. The only windows were for suite which faced the Street or the petite rear yard (none of which, I guess, would have been scandalous to somebody the likes of Phoebe, who had previously "lived connected the streets").

The 1880 census shows 15 families living in the building's eight tiny apartments, most immigrants from Federal Republic of Germany, French Republic, Ireland, and England. Away 1930, about all the residents were first-multiplication European country immigrants. But by 1953, the building was renovated, and the ii apartments per floor were cut up into four even smaller apartments (now nineteen tote up, with the first floor commercial space converted to apartments), thus making Phoebe's apartment number of 14 at length possible.

After the refurbishment and in the post-War years, the building housed many another fewer heroic large families, and many more singles, couples, and roommates. On this account, the show's representation of Phoebe's living situation is somewhat earthy. Of course of study, the tiny four-to-a-floor apartments would have borne little resemblance to the relatively liberal space Phebes called dwelling house.

So finally, a combination of incredible luck, timing, and family connections could have successful the friends' living situations, or at any rate some aspects of them, in theory possible. That said, any 20-something without a sincere job arriving in Greenwich Village in 1994 (to state nothing of today) expecting to find and afford an apartment like the ones on Friends would likely have been painfully disappointed. I guess no one told them life was gonna equal that fashio.

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Top justly photo in pencil lead is filed low Two hundred via Wikimedia

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This billet comes from Village Preservation. Since 1980, Village Saving has been the community's directive advocate for preserving the cultural and architectural inheritance of Greenwich Village, the East Village, and Noho, working to prevent inappropriate development, elaborate landmark protection, and create computer programing for adults and children that promotes these neighborhoods' alone historic features. Take more history pieces on their blog Off the Grid

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Neighborhoods : Greenwich Village

Where the Friends Apartment Building in New York

Source: https://www.6sqft.com/friends-in-nyc-how-plausible-were-the-greenwich-village-apartments-depicted-in-the-hit-90-series/

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