Building block
A ‘Sesame’ set designer reveals that the ’hood wasn’t always so kid-friendly
LIKE any New York block, Sesame Street has seen its ups and downs, questionable design choices, gentrifications and teardowns in the past half-century.
But unlike actual city streets, the television address had to prioritize sensitive kiddie viewers with its various face-lifts.
Take the original “Sesame Street” set, fashioned by production designer Charles Rosen in 1969. Based on a mashup of brownstone blocks in Harlem, The Bronx and the Upper West Side, it aimed to capture a real New York City street. Maybe too real of a New York City street.
There was “a trash heap in the middle” of the block, production designer David Gallo tells The Post. The show’s famous brownstone, 123 Sesame Street, is at one end of the Street; on the other end was the Hooper’s Store. Today, it’s a bodega, but back then, it was a soda shop. A sign in the window read, in broken Spanish, “NO HABLO ESPANO.”
“Mr. Hooper was a curmudgeonly guy,” says Gallo, who oversaw the most recent overhaul of the “Sesame” set in 2015. He says those design choices were a sign of the times. “They had Muppets that smoked back then. When you buy a box set of the show from the early years, it comes with a warning sign that the content might not be appropriate for children.”
Although those touches were long gone by 2015, Gallo still had a lot of work to do when he was asked to refresh the show for its 46th season.
Hooper’s “looked like an Ikea, with yellow-and-blue walls and a pumpkin-colored awning,” he says, wincing. “They were choosing bright colors more like the way people imagine a children’s show should look.”
But when Gallo looked at real kids’ drawings of urban neighborhoods for inspiration, they didn’t focus on those eyesore shades. He decided to repaint the corner store green — still kid-friendly, but with a little more character — and added details like a pressed-tin ceiling and vintage awnings for “urban realism.” It was a minor makeover compared to his next: finding distinctive spots for the characters to live. Gallo caused an outrage when he moved Oscar from the left side to the right side of the Sesame brownstone — and added a blue compost bin next to his trash can. “I got a lot of hate mail,” says Gallo. “People don’t like change . . . Moving him was radical.” (For Elmo, too: In a video, the Muppet gripes that Oscar’s trash can is right under the window to his room, and “gets a little smelly in the summer.”) But Oscar’s new position, Gallo says, better allowed the furry grump “to comment on all the crazy crap in the neighborhood.” Big Bird’s nest was relocated from a crate surrounded by barrels to a tree. “We built a tree and attached to it kitchen cabinets and shelves, with a proper mailbox and a kitchen lamp,” Gallo says. “There’s a picture of Mr. Hooper and Big Bird’s baby pictures, which are eggs. It’s a combination of nest and weird apartment.” Most dramatically, Gallo demolished the wall behind No. 123 and added the view of a bridge in the background. “There had never been any air at that studio,” he says. The new vista brought “a sense of depth,” and made the setting feel more real. Even though he had his bosses’ blessing, Gallo says he freaked out “when the crew started throwing out the scenery.” It wound up being a “wonderful day,” though: “Everyone was invited onto the set. The best part was that [longtime cast member] Bob [McGrath] was there. He had been horrified when he heard the set was going to get redone, but then he was overjoyed.” The most durable component of the “Sesame Street” set is the brownstone itself. Made of wood and fiberboard, the stoop was replaced a couple of years ago — but 123 remains more or less the same as it was in 1969. “That’s the original set,” says Gallo, “the best-built piece of scenery on that soundstage.”