A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood Was Filmed at Mr. Rogers’s Real-Life Studio

Nice. Welcoming. Lovely. Wonderful. Accommodating. If you watched just one episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood back in the day, then you know these are some of the virtues Fred Rogers imparted to his young viewers. They’re also the words that production designer Jade Healy uses to describe her experience working on A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. The new drama (opening Friday, November 22) depicts the real-life friendship between the kind-hearted, soft-spoken children's show host (Tom Hanks) and the cynical magazine journalist (Matthew Rhys) assigned to profile him in 1998. “You really had to be there,” Healy tells Architectural Digest. “Everyone was smiling every day. When Tom sang the theme song for the first time, it was like a dream.”

It helped that he was singing in the very same space where Rogers made the magic happen. To authentically capture Rogers’s spirit, Healy and her team built the entire Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood set—including his living room, the miniature town and the Neighborhood of Make-Believe—at the now-empty Fred Rogers Studio at WQED-TV in Pittsburgh. “We didn’t think we could do it because the stage is really small and we had to pack in his set, his TV crew, and the extra layer of our own film crew,” she explains. “We looked into other places, but at the end of the day, nothing else actually felt right.”

Re-creating Rogers’s world over the course of three months required a little detective work and a lot of assistance from his loved ones, including his widow, Joanne. Healy (who also oversaw the new divorce drama Marriage Story) and her team paid several visits to the local Fred Rogers Center and Archive to examine, photograph, and measure several original pieces of furniture. “We wanted to make sure everything was constructed the same way,” she says. She took paint samples as well, because “the colors that you see when you watch a show are different than what they look like when they’re shot through the Ikegami camera.”

For the Neighborhood of Make-Believe—the fictional kingdom with its castle, treehouse, and clock tower inhabited by Rogers’s hand puppets—the team set out to meticulously replicate everything from the exact pattern of the curtains to the puffy white clouds behind the blue background to the cushion where Rogers knelt behind the scenes. (She notes the papier-mâché trees and its branches were “extra complex.”) After building the props, “we found a stage layout and had a lineup of where things went,” she says. “Like, OK, the edge of the castle has to be here and the clock is here.”

Healy also enlisted a few original crew members, several of whom built the playful miniature models of the film’s New York and Pittsburgh locations that are used in the opening sequence and as transitions in the narrative. David Newell, the original show’s prop master, who often went on-camera to play cheery mailman Mr. McFeely, visited the set and donated a few original mailbags. These VIPs, she says, offered insight and one jaw-dropping revelation: “They shot the neighborhood and the land of make-believe on the same stage! They would tear down one set and rebuild the other and repaint the floor every single time!”

Joanne Rogers even opened up her home several times—and allowed the production team to use original family photos as well as a painting of a banana bunch crafted by Rogers’s sister. “He was a private man so I wanted to see where he lived and what his bedroom looked like,” Healy says. She admits she was surprised by what she saw: “I always envisioned him living in this cozy house in a neighborhood. But it’s actually an apartment in the city.”

And when Joanne visited the set, the atmosphere was beautiful, indeed. “She was overjoyed to see the neighborhood on that stage,” she says. “I don’t think she or anyone else involved with the show ever thought they’d ever see it again. It was like bringing Fred back for a few days.”

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest