Oh that's a good one
Dexter: Resurrection Filming Locations: The Subway Station
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The Location: The Subway Station.
Q.
What is it supposed to be on the show?
A. An underground subway station, as well as a street-level subway entrance.
Q.
Where is it supposed to be on the show?
A. This is supposed to be the York Street subway station in Brooklyn, NY.
Q. When did we see it on the show?
A. We see this location near the end of Episode 2 of Season 1 of Resurrection.
After Dexter locates Ron Schmidt, the Dark Passenger killer, at the bridge at the Bridge Data Network building, and then stops him from abducting another rideshare driver, Dexter follows the man to the nearby York Street subway entrance.
He follows him down into the subway station, but runs into traffic on
the stairs, and due to his recent rush with death and lengthy recovery
in the hospital, Dexter isn't in
top-notch condition, so by the time he catches up to Schmidt, the killer
has made it into a subway train car and the doors have closed. all
Dexter can do is lean against a red girder, breathing heavy, and then
walk back up the stairs to the street above.
Q. What is it actually in real life?
A. An underground subway station , just not in Brooklyn
Q.
Where can I find it in real life?
A. These are actually two separate
locations, almost a mile apart: The underground subway station where Dexter chases the Dark Passenger killer, and the above-ground Subway entrance that we see Dexter climb out of at the end of the scene.
And despite the signs, neither of
them is anywhere near the York Subway station in Brooklyn.
The subway entrance that we see Dexter walk up out of (after he loses the Dark Passenger) is the Franklin Street Station Subway (Downtown train). Here is a StreetView of that entrance.
That entrance is on a small, triangular traffic island in Lower Manhattan, between W Broadway on the east, Varick Street on the west, and Franklin Street on the outh .
The GPS coordinates are 40.718998, -74.006686 .
They changed the signs on that subway entrance to read. York Street., but of course the sign actually reads Franklin Street in real life.
( In fact, the actual York Street subway station in Brooklyn does
not have this kind of traditional subway entrance at all. The only way
you can get down to the York Street subway is by entering a door on the side of a building,
and walking down a long tunnel. And once you get there, the York
Street subway station doesn't resemble the one that Dexter was in. The
most obvious difference is that it's still girders are green, while
station Dexter enters has red girders. )
They needed to say that it was the York Street station, because Dexter starts following the Dark Passenger killer from a spot near the Brooklyn Bridge, and the closest subway station to the Brooklyn Bridge is the York Street station.
But subway stations are busy places, and they needed to film and one
that could be closed down for the shoot. There aren't that many of them
to choose from. So like many other TV productions, they ended up filming
down in the Bowery Subway Station, at their closed southern platform.
But they did not shoot the scene of Dexter coming up out of the subway entrance at this Bowery location. They only used the Bowery's underground station, not its street-level entrance. Instead, they used the Franklin Street entrance, as mentioned above, and just changed the signs.
( The actual entrance to the Bowery Subway is around 7 Delaney St, on the south side of that street. Here's a StreetView of that actual Bowery exit. And here is a map link to that Bowery location )
So in the few seconds it takes Dexter to climb the stairs from that
Bowery underground subway station, he suddenly comes up almost a mile to
the southwest, at the Franklin station.
Q. How the heck did you figure out where it was?
A. This was
time-consuming, because at first I assumed the signs were real, and
that they were shooting at the York subway station and it's entrance, so
I wasted a lot of time trying to find the street level entrance to that
station, which, of course, did not exist. It was only later that I
realized they had faked the signs, and I had to start all over again
looking for a subway entrance that match what we saw when Dexter came up
out of that subway station .
Even that was difficult because many subway stations in New York look alike, and the street-level subway entrances are also semi-identical, with only minor differences.
Normally, you could easily tell the difference by the signs posted above each entrance and all over the underground stations. But for this production, Dexter was busy putting up fake signs that covered the real signs, so you couldn't trust those signs at all.
But
after much trial and error (during which I must have looked at half the
subway entrances in Manhattan), I finally found it on Franklin Street.
One major assist came from a profile shot of Dexter which showed the buildings across the street to the west. There, I spotted a teal-green building that I recognized from early paparazzi shots of another subway entrance to the same station, located across the street.
Those paparazzi photos
showed that they had filmed another scene involving a subway entrance,
with Harrison and Dexter. There was a distinctive teal-green building behind
them. But while I was trying to track down that entrance, I got a
good look at the teal-green building, so I recognized it when it
showed up in my StreetView of the Franklin station.
Finding the underground station
where they filmed the scene was equally difficult. All I was sure of is
that it wasn't the actual York Street station, and it wasn't the
Franklin station itself. (They only use the exit to the Franklin station, not the underground portion.)
But I knew that two Manhattan stations that are used frequently for filming movies and TV are
the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Streets station (where they filmed the Michael Jackson video Bad) and the Bowery subway
station (where they filmed scenes from the movie Isn't It Romantic, and the TV series Mr Robot). So I checked them out first.
I compared photos of the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Streets station with what is seen on the show, and it didn't match.
But then I found a
YouTube video showing the abandoned Bowery station, and one shot of the
stairs matched perfectly to the stairs that Dexter comes down when he's
chasing the Dark Passenger:
Small details matched, everything from the position of the red girders
next to the staircase, to the surveillance camera positioned just to the right.
(The only difference is that there is a subway train visible on the tracks in the shot from Dexter, while that track is empty in the matching video shot.)
So it became obvious that they had shot these underground subway scenes down in the Bowery station, which is located at the intersection of Bowery & Delancey Street, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
The southern platform of that Bowery station
and its tracks closed in 2004, so it is now unused and available for filming .
But as mentioned above, the actual street-level entrance that they used for Dexter coming up at night was not the Bowery station's entrance, it was the exit to the
Franklin Street Station Subway. Here is a StreetView of that entrance.
( According to paparazzi photos, they also shot at the other Franklin Street entrance across the street, which was used for other scenes
involving Dexter, Harrison and Batista. This second Franklin
Street entrance is located across the street,
at the southwest corner of Varick St and Franklin St. It's about
120
feet west of that island entrance used in this Dexter/Dark
Passenger scene.
