How ‘Love Story’ Perfectly Recreated 1990s New York

Before Bloomberg, before the High Line, before the $18 cocktail, there was a different New York City. One filled with phone booths and newsstands and Gray’s Papaya on practically every grimy street corner — a New York where getting your bicycle ripped off was almost as much a rite of passage as stomping on your first cockroach.

We’re referring to, of course, Manhattan circa the 1990s, arguably the height of human civilization — and an historic period that’s been meticulously resurrected in Ryan Murphy’s Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette. Every detail of that iconic era — the flip phones, the glass-brick-filled lofts, the bustling magazine kiosks (remember those?) — seems to have been teleported from the not-so-distant past onto the screen, right down to the “Be Good to the Roxy and the Roxy Will Be Good To You” sign at the long-gone Roxy nightclub in Chelsea (which was recreated for the series in Brooklyn, but more on that in a bit).

The wizard responsible for this remarkable bit of time travel is production designer Alex DiGerlando, who happens to have some first-hand memories of the period from attending NYU during in the 1990s. The Hollywood Reporter dug up its old Motorola StarTAC and gave him a call to ask how he did it. Read our chat, below.

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You lived through ’90s New York yourself. What was the overall challenge of recreating it for Love Story?

The nineties are kind of a weird era — it’s a transitional period. You see the ’80s and you know it immediately. But there’s a lot of the ’90s that still seeped into what we’re doing now. I don’t know if it’s because it’s come back, or it just never went away.

What were some of the specific anachronisms you had to deal with on the streets?

It’s like a period landmine. Everywhere you look, down to things you wouldn’t expect. The horizontal crosswalk lines — those did exist back then. Now everywhere you look it’s a series of horizontal lines. We tried to frame those out as much as possible. Bus lanes and bicycle lanes are everywhere too. We had to either frame those out or paint them out in a couple of instances.

Some of the actual locations in the show still exist. How much work did they require?

A lot of these places, because they’re so iconic of the time, are sort of trapped in amber, and we were really lucky so many of them still exist. Odeon hasn’t changed at all — the chairs have changed, and we replaced them to match what they had back then. The current chairs are red, white and green plastic wicker. Back then they had these more mid-century bent chrome metal chairs, where it arches back and then cantilevers off the bottom, with red and green Naugahyde upholstery. And then the Odeon sign — the thing that was on Bright Lights Big City — that’s still there.

What about Panna II, the Indian restaurant where JFK Jr. (played by Paul Anthony Kelly) and Carolyn (played by Sarah Pidgeon) had their first date?

At the time, there were four restaurants that were sort of stacked on top of each other, but now only Panna exists. And there’s a lot of LED lights in there now. So we had to bring in a lot more incandescent bulbs and dress out the other windows to make it look like it did back then.

The Roxy was a different situation entirely.

That building doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s the Lantern House on the High Line now — those condominiums have taken over what that space was. We found a nightclub called Elsewhere in Bushwick, which is a really cool place. The actual Roxy, before it was the Roxy, was a roller-skating rink — huge and sweeping, with very high ceilings. Elsewhere is much smaller, but it does have very high ceilings and it’s very dark and kind of cavernous. It had a lot of modern things — point-of-sale interfaces, LED lights. We had to strip all of that out and bring in candelabras and the swings. We built the banquettes with the zebra pattern the Roxy had. And then we built a facade over the exterior that mirrored the Roxy’s architecture and recreated the neon sign and the “Be Good to the Roxy” sign, which was printed on sheet metal.

Wasn’t there originally supposed to be a scene with Carolyn at Barneys? That store was a major New York hotspot in the 1990s.

We looked into shooting there — weirdly, the Barneys building is still sitting empty. But it would have been a very big project to bring it back to what it was, and then the scene ended up getting simplified. For scheduling purposes, they moved it into the Calvin Klein showroom, because we had that set built already.

The phone booth scene is getting a lot of attention — where girls break one open to steal a Kate Moss Calvin Klein poster.

I think it was while we were making the show that the last phone booth in New York had just been removed. We sourced one from a prop house in Los Angeles and had it shipped over. As a person who was at NYU at that time period, the stealing of posters from phone booths and bus stops was a thing.

What about the smaller props — the things most viewers would never consciously notice?

Every member of the team really develops tunnel vision, reading everything we can, looking at every picture we can find, and then trying to mine those data sources for details we can use to tell the story — even if it’s never spoken, but you can see it and it tells you about the character.

Like, say, JFK Jr.’s bikes, which keep getting stolen.

Our prop master did a lot of work to figure out what kinds of bikes he actually rode and then sourced those.

The show is landing at a moment of intense ’90s nostalgia. Do you have a theory about why?

My 15-year-old daughter is very into the music and just ’90s things in general. I remember in the ’90s thinking we got stuck with the lame era, and looking back at the ’70s thinking that’s when all the cool stuff was happening. Now, having the distance, I kind of see the appeal. I actually think it’s the last era before the smartphone. There is something oppressive about being tied into everything all the time. Watching the show, there is something kind of like a breath of fresh air, where the plot is not driven by this thing. And it’s also the last era of monoculture. Whereas now everything’s so fragmented — a band like Nirvana today, people might like them, but they would not be the biggest band.

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Love Story releases new episodes Thursdays at 6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET on FX/Hulu. Read THR‘s interviews and coverage here.