Q.
What is it supposed to be on the show?
A. An apartment.
Q.
Where is it supposed to be on the show?
A. According to Dexter's 911 phone call, it's supposed to be at 758 Albany Ave, 5th floor, in New York City.
Q. When did we see it on the show?
After Mia picks up some unsuspecting fellow at a cocktail lounge, she takes him back to her apartment, and tells him to undress.
When he enthusiastically complies, she brutally smacks him in the head
with a heavy wine bottle, knocking him unconscious.
When he comes to, the guy finds himself tied to an X-cross (AKA a St Andrew's Cross), a restraint device used in BDSM play.
She sadistically tells him that she is about to burn his eyes out
with lye, as she lays out a number of scary-looking metal implements she can
use to torture him.
Fortunately, Dexter has been secretly watching this unfold from atop a
building right across the street.
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Faking a New York accent, Dexter calls 911 and reports that Lady Vengeance is about to kill a man.
Shortly thereafter, just in the nick of time, the NYPD how up and raid the place.
Mia is arrested, and we see her being escorted out and placed in the back of a police car.
Inside the apartment, police detectives
discover the trophies she has taken from her victims, including
false evidence that Dexter has planted there in order to lead the police
to believe that she killed the sexual predator Ryan (who was actually
killed by Harrison).
Q. What is it actually in real life?
A. A condo building.
Q.
Where can I find it in real life?
A. Mia's condo is located at 55 N Moore Street, in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City.
here is a full height view of the building from StreetEasy:
It is located on the north side of Moore Street, less than two blocks away from the Hudson River
The arched window
of Mia's apartment, through which Dexter observes Mia with her victim,
is indeed on the 5th floor of this building at 55 N Moore Street.
These two buildings are just east of the previous location on Moore Street where Dexter drops off a couple near a Swan Lake poster.
Its also just a block west of the subway entrance from which Dexter emerges after pursuing the Dark Passenger killer.
And they are just a street north of Franklin Street, where they filmed
multiple scenes as well, including the steakhouse restaurant and scenes
of Dexter & Harrison walking after they left that restaurant.
(But by New York standards, these apartments are a long way from the cocktail lounge
where she picked the guy up. Its about three miles southeast of Madame
George. In most towns, you could drive that distance in three or four
minutes. But on the traffic-heavy Manhattan Island, is likely to be a 30
minute commute.)
[ The interior of this apartment was
seen earlier in the episode when Dexter planted the evidence there. But
since it was simply an interior shot, I can't be 100% sure whether it
was actually
shot on location there or if it was just a studio set. Given the photos
I've seen online of similar lofts, I think it is the actual
interior. But set designers are so damn good at recreating places, that it's impossible to be certain ]
As for Dexter's location, the building with the rooftop that served as Dexter's observation perch across the street...
It is actually across the street from Mia's place, on the south side of Moore Street, But not directly across the street; it's one space to the left of her building.
And because Dexter's building is located on the southwest corner of Moore St. & Hudson St., its address is technically at 117 Hudson St, although for this scene they shot the side of the building that faces Moore St. (and thus faces Mia's condo).
Here is an aerial view with a red marker showing where he was standing.
( It's a bit confusing. Not only is it dark, but that gray part
behind Dexter, which appears to be part of the same building is
actually a separate, taller building behind Dexter's building (to the
south, at 105 Hudson). It looks like it's a lot closer than it
really is because the shot was taken with a telephoto lens, which
flattens things and makes distant objects appear to be closer than they
are. )
The building itself dates back to 1888, and it appears that it is now used mainly for loft apartments.
There are two good shots of Dexter's rooftop location, before
and during the arrest scene, but they are cropped tightly and it is at
night, so it's not easy to determine what the building as a whole looks
like.
As for Mia's building, we really only see the door and the loading dock in front:
Here is a matching StreetView of Mia's apartment building:
Here is an aerial
photo of the location. And here is a map
link.
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Q. How the heck did you figure out where it was?
A. This was one of the most difficult locations to find for the entire season .
Not much is shown of the building's exterior, the
shots are cropped close. plus, it's night, and there are flashing
emergency lights distracting from the visuals. There are no identifying signs to
speak of, and we never get to see the building from a distance.
As you can see from this original screencap, the
image is so dark, and the red lights are so distracting that although
the scene is artistic and dramatic, it doesn't offer much in revealing details if
you are trying to figure out where they shot the scene.
Even
after I greatly lightened the image in Photoshop, There still isn't
that much to see because the shot is so tightly cropped. But at least I
could make out there was a loading dock in front, I could see what the stone pillars
on each side of the door looked like, and that there were a series of
what looked like vents near the top of the remaining sections. But
that's not much to go on.
So I searched for this place off & on for months before finally finding it.
As I lightened and enhanced the screencaps, I noticed more and more details that were basically invisible before, in the original dark image.
The
first thing I noticed, when I brightened the image, was that the road
in front of the building was a cobblestone street, made up of
numerous brick-like blocks rather than modern, flat pavement.
Those kind
of streets date back over 100 years, and there aren't that many of them left.
Googling revealed that most cobblestone streets in New York are in
Tribeca and Soho. And I knew that they had been shooting previous scenes in Tribeca. So that was the first place I looked.
Next,
I noticed unusual platforms in front of the buildings, that I assumed
were loading docks. Normally, I would have no idea where these might be in NYC,
but because I had already been looking in Tribeca, I knew that they
were a fairly common feature of the buildings on some of the streets there.
So now I was looking for a building with a black loading dock
in front, located on a cobblestone street, and most likely in Tribeca.
You would
think that
might be sufficient to find the place, but it wasn't. It seems like
every other building on a cobblestone street has a damn loading dock (or
some similar platform) in front of it. I learned later that's because
many of the buildings in Tribeca used to be industrial buildings, which
were only recently converted into commercial and residential
establishments when the area
was gentrified in the 1980s & '90s.
I eventually also
noticed that when the camera panned to the right, as the detectives left the building, I
could see that the street appeared to eventually end by running into
another street with taller buildings, most likely forming a T-intersection.
I knew that the area of Tribeca
that I had been searching (where they had previously filmed other
scenes) also had streets like that, so I doubled-down my search of the side streets in that
neighborhood.
Finally,
in one brief frame, I spotted what appeared to be the lower half of two
numbers on the building. I couldn't be sure, but I suspected they might
be street address numbers. But because could only see the lower
3rd of the numbers, all I could tell was that they were rounded on the
bottom and possible two-digit numbers included 88, 66, 55, 33 and
other two-digit combinations of those four numbers .
The Tribeca streets I had been looking at indeed had simple two-digit numbers for the most part.
So I started checking out those likely number combinations, on various
cobblestone streets in the neighborhood, and finally found the
building at 55 Moore St.
Once
I had found it, all the other details matched the screencaps, including
the shape of the railing around the loading dock, the columns, the look
of the building to the left, and of course, the fact that the
street terminated at another street (which turned out to be West
Broadway) at its east end.
And when I turned the StreetView camera up,
I was pleased to see that the arched windows near the top of
the building matched the arched window through which Dexter watched
Mia attempt to kill her victim.
And
as a bonus, the building where Dexter was standing on the roof while he
watched, which was supposed to be right across the street, turned out
to be actually across the street from Mia's place!
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