- Welcome to this episode of Field Trip.

We're here today in Troy, New York on this set of HBO's new series, The Gilded Age.

Matt, Greg, and I are gonna walk around Troy and find out what brought this series here.

(upbeat music) - We're here at the Oakwood Cemetery in Troy, New York where HBO is wrapping up the last day of filming on their upcoming series, The Gilded Age.

Now we're gonna go to downtown Troy and check out some of the architecture that is going to be featured in this series as well as other projects in the past.

Come on.

(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Bob Shaw, I'm the production designer on HBO's, The Gilded Age and we're here to take advantage of the wonderful architecture of Troy.

(calm music) With Troy, it's the biggest selection of houses of the period that we really needed to feature, certainly on the east coast and in New York City there are a lot of houses from the 1890s, in Greenwich Village maybe a smattering of some older houses from the 1840s or something but Troy just has this wealth of houses from the 1830s, the 1840s, 50s, and we can go to Washington Park and have somebody walk around the entire perimeter and with very few exceptions and almost no noticeable exceptions have houses that are of the period of 1882 of our story.

People always forget that if something is set in 1882, you need to have at least the prior 50 years represented.

(calm music) - I'm here with Don Ritenour, he's a filmmaker, a historian, he's kind of a local Renaissance man and he's gonna tell us a little bit more about why filmmakers are coming to Troy.

- [Don] So for several years now, there's been these film tax credits where a filmmaker, could be a big budget, could be a little budget, can get tax credits, basically get the sales tax written off and what that does of course is when you are looking for a place to shoot, New York City is really expensive to shoot, no matter if there's tax credits or not but if you're trying to mimic something that looks like New York City, like The Golden Age, you look for areas that can mimic that, you know, background but not cost as much and then when you add the tax credits to that, you can really get a high quality production for much less money than you know, you're trying to shoot a Hollywood production over in California.

(calm music) So you come down, you'll walk around Monument Square, we have some iconic buildings here, we have one of the earliest department stores that was built in 1835, it's called the Cannon Building.

We've got the monuments, we have many buildings that have cast iron storefronts, and most of these have name plates so you can find out who made them, the building here, this is the old Troy Sentinel Newspaper where the most famous Christmas poem was published in 1823, Twas The Night Before Christmas.

There's what I call boot scrapers.

There's one this side.

Again, the roads were, the streets were dirt, in fact, Troy did not get a paved street till 1854 with the first cobblestone and that was done down on first street, which is what we're on, okay.

But, consider now, horses, lots of horses, lots of dirt, lots of mud, and so you're not gonna go into a nice, beautiful mansion with horse crap on it, right?

So what they did is they came up with what are called boot scrapers, okay?

So before you go into a house, you would just scrape off whatever was on, and now the original ones were actually on the side and then when it got fancy in the Victorian Age where they started to make everything sort of elaborate, they built them right into the railings and you'll see these down almost, you'll see them, walk down, I'll show you another example.

Scrape off before you go in.

You'll notice in Troy there's an abundance of casting rod iron, you know, railings, fences, balustrades, I mean, it's just, because Troy was an iron town, lots of iron and the reason for that is because the Champlain Canal where all the iron came from, the Adirondacks came down on the Champlain Canal and the lock one was right in Troy.

So they were able to get pig iron, they were able to get, you know, iron ore, they could make their own or they could just remelt stuff that they could buy.

So you walk along Troy and you see lots and lots of beautiful worked iron.

(bell dings) This is actually an iron front.

So I have a magnet here, you can see it sticks right on.

- [Matt] Wow.

- The advantage of using iron is you could use very thin columns as you can see here and then you can put large expanses of window in between them and what that did is it let natural light come in and you can put your goods, particularly your new goods right in the window and that was the birth of window shopping.

(calm music) Used to be the American Hotel was here, he bought that, he demolished it and he built this in 1896 or like, no 1897.

Four hundred people worked in that building.

There were 53 different departments.

You could buy anything, including chocolate covered ants and grasshoppers, which I don't recommend by the way.

It looks like they're doing some work here.

But now imagine, you know, this is our new floor, so there was the first floor, it had a, when you walk down these staircases it came down and it was a big marble staircase like the one in, Gone With The Wind, just gigantic marbles, beautiful staircase but there were, like I said, there were over 50 departments in this and it was completely wide open and then you had the atrium that cut down natural light.

This was one of the most successful department stores in the country and he actually built an annex, another five story building on the other side but they tore that down but this is what it's most famous for, what he's most famous for.

'One price and no deviation, perfect satisfaction guaranteed, or money cheerfully refunded.'

This is where it began.

- [Matt] Wow.

- He was the first to offer your money back if you didn't like what you, what you wanted and so if you built a building, if you opened a store, you were competing with thousands of other people and so you had to make your building sort of look different from the rest of them and so that's why you'll see all those different kinds of architectural detail in Troy because everybody is competing with everybody else.

Oh yeah, I love talking about this stuff.

(upbeat music) - Thank you for joining us on this episode of Field Trip.

- We want to hear your ideas on where you think we should go on a field trip next.

- Head over to wmht.org/fieldtrip and submit your idea.

- So before we head back to the station, we all need to scrape off our shoes, had busy day, busy shoot.

All right, until next time.

(laughing)