NYC NOW - The Subway Station Behind Some of NYC’s Most Iconic Movie Scenes

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

A film series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is spotlighting a Brooklyn subway station that has doubled as the backdrop for iconic movie scenes for decades. WNYC producer Verónica Del Valle explains how Hoyt Schermerhorn has been used in films from The Warriors to Coming to America. Also, WNYC reporter Brittany Kriegstein tells the story of Ellen Baum, a Brooklyn Heights resident who has spent weeks removing unusual items people have tied to the Brooklyn Bridge, turning a strange trend into a personal cleanup effort.  — Got any questions, comments or story ideas? Send us a message at [e-mail]

From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Jenae Pierre. Ever recall watching a movie and realizing the scene is taking place at a New York City subway station? A new series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is highlighting those films and the station behind them. Plus, New York City's Department of Transportation is responsible for cleaning city landmarks. But a Brooklyn Heights resident has taken it upon herself to clean the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, which has dirty tissues, trash bags, and even used condoms affixed to the Bridges Frame. We'll get into it all on today's episode.

But before we do that, here's what's happening in New York City. I feel like free child care is very important. Sometimes us women, we can't really go forward because we don't have nobody to help us take care of our kids. Mayor Zoran Mundani is teaming up with rapper and Bronx native Cardi B to help spread the word about universal child care for two-year-olds. New York City is opening up applications on June 2nd for its 2K program. Parents can apply in certain communities across Upper Manhattan, the Bronx, Southeast Queens, and Central and Eastern Brooklyn.

In a video released by his office Friday, Mamdani says the city is launching a jingle contest to help get parents to apply, and it'll be judged by Cardi B. We wanted to know if you would help judge that competition. Oh, I will judge it for sure. Cardi's going to help you. By judging this conference. The mayor's going to have you.

And I'm going to judge, and he's going to give... The initiative comes as child care continues to be a key affordability issue for New Yorkers. When New York City stopped issuing fines for not separating compost from trash, many New Yorkers just quit doing it. That's the finding from a new report from the Independent Budget Office. Analysts found that compost collection lost momentum right as fines stopped last year. And it hasn't recovered since. Those fines began again under Mayor Mumdani, but they haven't reached the same levels as last year

before former Mayor Eric Adams suddenly hit pause on enforcement. The budget experts say a combination of fines and education should convince more New Yorkers to separate their organic waste from the rest of their trash. Sanitation officials say they're just getting started with the big awareness campaign, but they'll turn up the heat with enforcement if they need to. The annual Easter Parade and Bonnet Festival returns to Manhattan Sunday. The photo worthy event draws people in their most elaborate hats.

For Brooklyn artist Casey Sobel, it's her favorite way to ring in spring. She's been attending the parade for years and says her hats usually take months to create. A beautiful artistic and creative expression of our excitement, of spring, of getting to, like, kick off the coldness of the winter and being inside. The parade and festival take place Sunday morning outside St. Patrick's Cathedral. The Brooklyn Academy of Music is marking 90 years of an iconic downtown Brooklyn subway station with a series of film shot in and around it. Can you guess which station?

I'll let you know after a quick break. Stay close. One has a favorite subway scene in a New York City movie. Maybe the chase in the Warriors, maybe a train hijacking and the taking of Pelham 123. Now, a film series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music is taking a closer look at those scenes and the station behind many of them. That's Hoyt Skirmahorn in Brooklyn, which filmmakers have used for decades to shoot subway scenes. WNYC producer Veronica Del Valle has been looking into this and reporting on it, and she joins me now. What's up, Veronica?

Hi, Jane. Do you have a favorite movie that has a favorite movie that has a show? New York City subway scene? So my favorite New York City subway movie actually isn't in the series we're talking about. Okay. It is in the Martin Scorsese movie After Hours, which I will only describe as being about the worst day of a pretty normal guy's life. He escapes this girl.

He's trying to woo his apartment and heads right into the subway. At midnight, when he discovers that the subway fair has gone out, and this is like in the days of quarters and subway tokens, and the guy just will not sell him a subway token. And he's this really boring guy who kind of lose. is his cool and then immediately get stopped by a cop. It's beautiful. Wow. I have to check that one out.

I have to be honest. I haven't seen that one. But one of my favorite New York City subway scenes is in the movie The Wiz. And I'm not sure if this is a part of the series or not, but it's a really cool subway scene where it's like a haunted subway and like the vending machines come alive and all of the characters, even Toto, are running from them. I have good news for you. You can see down the big screen as part of it.

of this series. Wow. Okay, that's totally cool. So tell me about this series and how did the organizers describe the idea behind it. So I talked to two guys who work at Bam. Their names are Jesse Tressel and Adam Goldberg. They were kind of the masterminds behind it all. And Adam told me that he's just constantly pitching ideas for serieses and hoping they

stick. And this one worked because the 90th birthday of the Hoyt-Skmerhorn station is actually coming out. 90 years old. Wow. So he was just like, you know, we can celebrate the movies. squirmarhorn is right around the corner from Bam, it was a perfect confluence of factors. So when you were reporting this, what stood out to you about the films that they chose?

So it kind of runs the gamut of film history. There's a little bit of something for everyone. You can see Crocodile Dundee, too, which is a movie that I have never had the pleasure of watching. But apparently it's very funny. You can see the taking of Pelham, 123, the 2009 version with Denzel Washington, not the original version. And there's actually two Sydney Lumet movies, The Wiz, of course. Yeah. And a kind of dark crime drama movie called The Pond Broker that both of them were actually nominated for Oscars. So you get to see one guy's career, lots of different kind of movies, laugh, cry, it's great. Yeah, I guess I need to make my way over to Bam because I haven't seen a few of these that you're calling out.

What about you? I've seen about half of them, and I will not lie, I watched a lot of them for this. Okay, okay. So the programmers have a phrase for the era of these films. Can you share that with us? So Adam Goldberg coined this phrase. He calls Battle Days New York. It's kind of the 70s or the 80s.

It's a little dark. It's a little gritty. Actually, coming to America, the Eddie Murphy movie, really encampures this concept. For those of you that aren't blessed enough to have seen the movie, Eddie Murphy plays a prince who's coming over from a rich African country to kind of find a wife. The Prince of Zamunda.

Zimunda. The Prince of Zimunda comes to America, and he kind of falls in love with this woman named Lisa, and he gets out of his limo, like is calling after her, and then gets in the subway. It's supposed to be Queens, but it's actually a skirmarhorn.

It's like baby's first experience with the subway. It's this place where, like, real things are happening, and this place where everyone has to interface with, like, New York as it actually is. Yeah. Now, of course, coming to America, The Wiz, these aren't recent movies. Can we talk about, like, the process? They are not, like, shutting down the subway to film these scenes, right?

So the secret is that Hoyt Skirmahorn has these two unused subway platforms that make filming there really, really easy. So, like I said, Hoyt Skormorhorn opened in the 30s, and there were two old-school New York City train lines that ran there until about the middle of the 40s. When subway patterns change, they closed those lines down, and then those platforms closed with them. So essentially, filmmakers can run subway trains to these platforms or put lots of actors on them without having to shut down the station and disrupt people's normal lives, unlike at another station, like Union Square maybe. Right, right. After reporting on this, did it change the way you think about subway scenes in New York movies?

You know, I can't stop thinking about the logistics of it. No. Like in the taking of Pelham, one, two, three, they're kind of hanging out in the subway tunnel between what's supposed to be, I think, 51st Street and 42nd Street. But it's actually the tunnel at Hoyt-Skirmerhorn. And I'm thinking about the ways that filmmakers are trying to trick us and make sure that a location feels like somewhere else. You see it in the Warriors, too, and they're one of the movies that's in this series. On the polls, it'll say Union, because it's supposed to be Union Square. But if you look really far in the background, you can actually see the words Hoyt on the subway wall. So it's this like little Easter egg hunt almost of process and artistry. Easter egg hunt. I see what you did there. So listen, we're talking about movies, but I can think of a couple of music videos that were actually shot there. When I saw this, I was like, you know, one of my favorites, Michael Jackson once again.

But bad was definitely shot in Hoyt. And it was a really cool scene. So we're bringing up Michael Jackson and Martin Scorsese twice in this conversation, I have to say. He actually directed that music video. And it's interesting because when Michael Jackson died in 2009, current New York Attorney General Tish James wanted to rename the Hoyt's Krimorhorn station after Michael Jackson. Oh, someone's a fan. It's really iconic. And like you see the station in the music video and you understand why it works so well for filming because it's big, big, big, big.

empty space that you can like have dancers run around in and that you can take over in a way that's really fun and is used in a really cool way in that music video specifically yeah for sure so when can people check out this series so the series starts screening on april 9th that's the 90th anniversary of hoit skirmerhorn movies will keep running until the 16th but make sure you head to the bam website because the movies aren't running for that whole time it's like little days of pairs of two and three. So find the one you want to see and go see it. All right. That's WMYC producer Veronica Del Valle. Thanks so much for stopping by. Thanks, Sheney. Can you tell us about your favorite subway movie scenes? Send us a voice memo or an email at NYC now at WMYC.org. We may use

your comment on a future episode. Thousands of people walk across the Brooklyn Bridge every day. Commuters, tourists, and everyday New Yorkers just trying to get their steps in or enjoy the spring weather. is Ellen Bown. Hi, I'm Ellen Bown, and I'm 37 years old from Brooklyn Heights. Ellen is one of those New Yorkers who walks across the Brooklyn Bridge to commute to work, clear her mind, and sometimes to meet friends in other boroughs. I'm originally from Long Island, and I spent one year in Lower Manhattan, and because of my proximity to the bridge, I mean, I'm almost always on it. I'm probably in like thousands of engagement photos in the background

from people seeing me on it. About a year ago, she started to notice that something strange was appearing along the walkways chain-link fences. Hair ties, tissues, tampons, condoms, underwear, like everything under the sun tied to this. Objectively, this is gross. Ellen thought so, so she decided to do something about it. It was one of those moments where I was like, you know, on a very micro level, I can affect change and do good things. WMYC reporter Brittany Krikstein met Ellen on the Brooklyn Bridge to talk to her about the

unusual items people have been leaving and why she spent weeks cleaning them up. Brittany joins me now. Hey, Brittany. Hey, Janae. Thanks so much. All right. So let's start with when you met Ellen. You met her on the Brooklyn Bridge. Tell me, what did you see there? Well, I saw the sort of ending of Ellen's project. She was coming to the end of her cleaning up. But, Janay, that's not to say that I still didn't see a bunch of really nasty things in that chain link fence. There were hair ties. There were band-aids, used band-aids, I may add. There were locks of hair, scraps of clothing, tissues, receipts.

It was disgusting. Why did Ellen decide that she was going to take it all down? I asked her that question, and she told me she started noticing a cacophony of trash building up. Sometimes they fall off, and then it goes straight into the East River, which is super gross. And so Ellen told me after seeing all that, she posted on Reddit about it, trying to find some answers and wondering if other people had been noticing this stuff too. Then in early February, I was walking across the bridge, and I remember reading the news that morning and feeling really defeated about the state of just everything.

She was headed to meet her friends in Staten Island, and you know, sometimes a hang with friends can turn things around. They really can. We had a great lunch, we had a great day, and it was one of those moments where I was like, you know, on a very micro level, I can affect change and do good things. So she was inspired. And when she got home, she decided I'm going to do something. I posted on Reddit, I put a picture of it, and I was like, I hate these and I'm going to take them down. Okay.

So what did this cleanup actually involve? Ellen told me that over the course of eight days, she put in at least 16 hours of work. Wow. I think that was an underestimate. Because she was up there almost every day. I was communicating with her. and it seemed to take hours and hours and hours, and she was mostly doing this by herself. Does Ellen have a day job?

She does. Ellen actually works in tech, and her schedule is a little flexible, so she said it gave her the time to go up and do this. And it actually helped her relax. She said, given just the chaotic political climate we're in and everything going on in the world, it was like a little piece of things that she could control, a little good deed that she could do for her city. And she did get some people who actually offered to help after seeing her Reddit post. One of the regulars on the bridge, who's a photographer, also helped her out sometimes. But it was mostly her out there, Jenae, and any New Yorkers who, you know, would briefly come up to her while she was working.

Some people ask why people put things on the bridge to begin with. Other people, like, thank me for doing it. And then other people will just come right behind me and tie their thing to the bridge. And yeah, so it's a mixture of people. Have you asked them why they're doing it? It's mostly for, oh, you know, it's our first time on the bridge or whatever. And I'm like, that's great. It's still your first time on the bridge.

You don't have to leave this thing here that's going to fall into the river. But yeah, so it's been very interesting. But I'm also not going to, like, yell at anybody for doing it. But I am going to take it off. Wow. Ellen is really doing God's work here, or at least the cities. It's true. The Department of Transportation is supposed.

post to clean up this mess periodically. They're supposed to just basically keep tabs of any trash on the bridge. But Ellen thinks there's so many other transit problems they can be focused on. And she doesn't blame them for not getting to it all the time. She said her councilman actually said thank you, but she hasn't heard from the rest of, you know, city agencies. Yeah. So I know this cleanup started in February. Any idea what it looks like now? So the bridge looks remarkably different, thanks to Ellen's efforts. Almost all of that trash, those hanging, disgusting tissues and other items are all gone. But she's worried about the problem coming back, especially with so many tourists coming over the bridge every day.

It's kind of like New York City's version of the Paris-Lox Bridge, if you've heard of that today. People have seemingly just turned to regular household trash instead. And so Ellen's worried about this coming back, and she really wants to start a monthly cleanup. So she has a little website going, and she's trying to get the word out to bring the community together to keep this problem at bay. I don't want to take away the feelings that these folks have of having, you know, a piece of me is here. Although I feel if you're on the bridge, you're part of the art already. So, you know, when you're going hiking, it's leave no trace. I feel that maybe that's the same for a historic landmark, like the Brooklyn Bridge.

People can look up no locks, spelled L-O-C-K-S, comma, yes locks, L-O-X, meaning no locks on the bridge, but definitely locks on bagels. And that's Ellen's website where she's trying to just gather a bunch of members of the community, whether those are Brooklynites or people from the rest of the five boroughs to help keep this issue at bay, help keep trash off the bridge, and just kind of get folks together to do something positive. Yeah, all right, pretty cool. That's WNYC reporter Brittany Cricstein. Thanks a lot, Brittany. Thanks so much, Jeney. And thank you, dear listener, for listening to NYC Now. I'm Jenei Pierre. See you next time.