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Guest post by Bravofan’s MARIA M. DIAZ
Curious about the real life locations of some of the places we see Blair, Serena, Dan, and Chuck on Gossip Girl?
A company called OnLocation Tours, who also give tours based on Sex and The City and The Sopranos recently started giving tours based on Gossip Girl’s exterior shooting locations. I was recently able to attend a tour, which was super fun and informative!
The tour starts at the courtyard of the gorgeous Palace Hotel, which any fan will recognize instantly. It’s here that the van der Woodsens and Basses live. After you check in with your tour guide, you get on the charter bus and are welcomed as a “fabulous Upper EastSider.”
The bus is equipped with televisions, where you get to watch scenes from Gossip Girl from locations that you just saw in real life! It’s a little surreal, but very cool especially when you realize how much bigger many of the buildings look on screen. The Museum of the City of New York, used as the exterior for the Constance Billard School for Girls, looks enormous on screen, but in reality is not that big.
The tour itself is a very nice overview of several cool Manhattan neighborhoods: starting on the Upper East Side (several of the buildings used as exteriors for Blair and Nate’s houses are pointed out) and weaving back through Midtown, with a stop at Grand Central Terminal, which is where the series starts, right as Serena gets back to town. We’re also taken to the Campbell Apartment, the sexy bar inside Grand Central, where Nate and Serena consumated their love on the bar.
Here’s a Gossip Girl fan video that shows Grand Central and the Campbell Apartment:
Eventually, we end up on the Lower East Side, with a stop at the Tory Burch boutique (where Dan runs into Blair and Serena shopping) and some complimentary frosting shots from Babycakes bakery, where Dan was getting a pie from the first night he ran into a very drunken Serena on Thanksgiving. Here’s a video to refresh your memory:
Some other stops include Henri Bendel, the store where Blair dreams she had her Breakfast at Tiffany’s moment, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the familiar steps where the girls eat their yogurt every morning and Dylan’s Candy Bar, where Vanessa and Dan go shopping. The tour lets you get off and take photos and lets you do some shopping at Bendel’s and Dylan’s so you can feel like a real socialite!
Leading the pack was our extremely enthusiastic tour guide, Meghan Hart, who impressed us with her encyclopedic knowledge of the show.
I would totally recommend this tour for Gossip Girl fans visiting New York City. I would even recommend it for parents and boyfriends of Gossip Girl fans! Even as someone who grew up in New York City, there were a few places I’d never been to and facts about the city that I didn’t know.
Palace Hotel Image from win_bassett
[...] Zuzanna hopped aboard the On Location Tours bus and gave the inside scoop on Gossip Girl filming locations, behind-the-scenes info, talking about the cast, living in NYC and gossip about the show. For the inside scoop on what one of the Gossip Girl tours is like, read our review here. [...]