Kaufman Astoria Studios

Where it sits. The studio occupies a walled campus around 34-12 36th Street in Astoria, Queens, roughly fifteen minutes from Midtown Manhattan by subway. Astoria in 1920 was industrial, cheap and — crucially — close enough to the Broadway theatre district that stage actors could shoot in the morning and perform at night. That single fact explains why the American film industry's eastern capital ended up on this particular street rather than in Manhattan.

The story behind it. Famous Players-Lasky, the production arm that became Paramount, built the studio in 1920, and for a decade it was the busiest film factory on the east coast. W. C. Fields made his silent features here. Gloria Swanson worked here continuously from 1923. The first Sherlock Holmes sound film, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, was made on these stages in 1929, as were the first two Marx Brothers pictures, The Cocoanuts (1929) and Animal Crackers (1930) — both adapted from Broadway shows the brothers were still performing at night. When talking pictures arrived, Paramount used Astoria heavily for short subjects starring New York radio and stage performers: Burns and Allen, Eddie Cantor, Ethel Merman, Rudy Vallee. The company moved everything to California in 1932, independents took over, and the last feature of that era was shot in 1938. From 1942 to 1971 the United States Army Signal Corps ran the plant as the Army Pictorial Center, turning out training and information films including the long-running series The Big Picture. The complex was listed on the National Register as a historic district in 1978, revived with federal money in 1981, and taken over in 1982 by the property developer George S. Kaufman, whose name it still carries.

What it makes now. Seven sound stages, including the large Stage K, and a 34,800-square-foot outdoor backlot dedicated on 3 December 2013, created by closing a block of 36th Street — still the only studio backlot in New York City. Sesame Street has taped here for decades; a puppeteer and a writer on the programme were married on the steps of the 123 Sesame Street set in 2008. Orange Is the New Black built its prison here, Succession shot here, and the list of productions runs back through The Cosby Show, Nurse Jackie, Law and Order and Mariah Carey's MTV Unplugged. Feature work has included the musicals Hair and The Wiz, Goodfellas, The Money Pit, Carlito's Way, sequences of the television adaptation of Angels in America and the 2009 remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. The corridors are hung with signed photographs of performers who worked on the lot, from Milton Berle and Frank Sinatra to Lena Horne, Paul Robeson, Lillian Gish and Claudette Colbert.

How you actually get in. You do not get into the studio itself, which is a working facility with no public tours. What you can enter is the Museum of the Moving Image, on the same campus at 36-01 35th Avenue, in a former studio building that opened as a museum in 1988 and was expanded and re-clad in 2011 by Leeser Architecture. Its core exhibition covers production, editing, sound, licensing and exhibition with more than a thousand objects, from Linda Blair's animatronic head to a wall of arcade cabinets that can be played. The Jim Henson Exhibition, opened in 2017, holds around 300 objects including original Muppets and drawings. There is a 267-seat theatre running repertory programming, and a 1920s-style screening room fitted out as a Egyptian-revival fantasy. Together the campus is the only place in New York where a century of continuous film production can be seen in one block.

Getting there and timing. The M and R trains stop at Steinway Street, the N and W at 36th Avenue, each a five-minute walk. The museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays and free on Thursday evenings, which is worth knowing. Allow two to three hours inside, more if the theatre is running something. Filming on the backlot occasionally spills into the surrounding streets, so it is not unusual to walk out of the museum into a base camp of trailers and lighting trucks along 36th Street, which is as close as most visitors will get to seeing the lot work.

What to combine it with. Astoria is one of New York's better eating neighbourhoods, with Greek tavernas along Broadway and 31st Street, Egyptian cafes on Steinway Street and the beer garden of the Bohemian Hall, running since 1910. Astoria Park, ten minutes north-west, sits under the steel arch of the Hell Gate Bridge of 1916 with the East River and Manhattan laid out beyond it, and holds the city's oldest and largest public swimming pool, built for the Works Progress Administration in 1936.