A set for Sesame Street that replicates a view of New York's Brooklyn Bridge. Photo / Winnie Au, The New York Times
Over its several decades, the show’s setting has always been both realistic and idealistic. And it has evolved, much like the New York City streets that inspired it.
At the time, the New York depicted in the media wasn’t glamorous – it was frightening. Crime, riots, filthy streets.
So, a city street was far from the obvious choice for the setting of a children’s show. But the perceived seediness of New York emboldened television producer Jon Stone as he was conceptualising Sesame Street. “For a preschool child in Harlem, the street is where the action is,” Stone said in Michael Davis’ book Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street. “Outside there are kids hollering, jumping double Dutch, running through the open hydrants, playing stickball. Our set had to be an inner-city street.”
Embracing the grit, Sesame Street would become one of the most recognisable blocks in the world. More than 50 years old, Sesame Street has endured, in part, because it is both realistic and idealistic at once. Through its aesthetics, the show is grounded in reality; and through its messaging, it portrays a vision of how urban life can be. It’s a block where residents of all backgrounds and varying income levels exist together harmoniously and where local businesses thrive.
But the block has changed over the decades – it’s noticeably cleaner and brighter now. New York has also changed – housing affordability, community spaces and walkability have been at risk.
And from time to time, relentlessly, Sesame Street seems to face an existential threat. Last month, Republican lawmakers voted to cut all federal funding for PBS, which is home to the show. And earlier this year, after the Trump administration announced that it would cut millions of dollars in federal funding for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind the show, the organisation announced that it would lay off 20% of its staff.
Still, the show survived, wrapping production in June for its 56th season, which will air on Netflix and PBS Kids later this year. Sesame Street remains a mainstay of American culture – celebrated, beloved, criticised and politicised.
The show started with television executive Joan Ganz Cooney, co-founder of Sesame Workshop, and the influence of urbanist Jane Jacobs.
Cooney was energised by the social climate of the 1960s and recognised the power of media to create real-world impact. In 1966, she won an Emmy for a documentary on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war-on-poverty programme. That same year, she wrote a study, “The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education,” that would inform the underlying mission of Sesame Street.
About the same time the show was being conceived, Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities became wildly popular. The seminal work outlined four principles that she thought were “indispensable” to a flourishing neighbourhood: it should serve multiple functions, blocks should be short, buildings should “vary in age and condition” and there should be a “dense concentration of people”.
“Even if you hadn’t read Jane Jacobs, that book was so huge that it was in the air,” said Benjamin Looker, author of A Nation of Neighborhoods and an associate professor of American studies at Saint Louis University.
The show’s creators, he said, were “assimilating some of the popular notions that she put into play about the value of the sidewalk and street life”.
On Sesame Street, the stoop, the outdoor-dining space in front of Hooper’s convenience store, and Elmo’s wide-open window blur the boundaries between public and private space, fostering neighbourly interactions among characters.
Street noises in the background and neighbours hollering through windows signal to viewers that this block is not a wealthy one. The streetscape, Looker said, “is an extension of people’s homes”.
“This is very characteristic of densely packed, urban neighbourhoods that have that kind of social life,” he said, “but it doesn’t match up with notions of privacy and the divide between how public and private operates in a very affluent neighbourhood.”
The stoop is a town square of sorts, where Big Bird shows off a new trim and Susan teaches children how to count.
Real stoops around the city function similarly – they’re where New Yorkers leave old books for strangers to pick up and where they share drinks with friends.
But as wealthy newcomers move into certain neighbourhoods, sitting on someone’s stoop can be viewed as trespassing or loitering. “In the past, certainly anyone could sit on someone’s stoop,” said Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, author of The Cities We Need.
“It wasn’t that you would feel like, ‘Oh, I can’t sit on that stoop, that’s private property,’ but that’s changing,” she said.
Beyond the stoop, there is a dance. In the very first scene of Sesame Street, Gordon introduces a new neighbour, Sally, to the block. The two walk down the street and run into Bob, who’s reading a newspaper; Mr Hooper, who’s carrying a brown grocery bag; and Ronald and Ariana, who are bouncing a ball back and forth as Ernie’s singing echoes from his bathtub. Such casual, improvised interactions make up what Jacobs called the “sidewalk ballet”.
Though random and unpredictable, these microinteractions are not coincidental. The block’s small square footage, the closeness of the buildings and the high concentration of people make them possible.
The contact that occurs on the sidewalk, Jacobs wrote, creates “a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust”.
Sesame St is a mixed-use block: in addition to multifamily housing, there are businesses, including a laundromat and Hooper’s. It’s walkable and fits the 15-minute city ideal, an urban planning concept that prioritises proximity between where people live and basic necessities. And with people on the block throughout various hours of the day, there will be more “eyes on the street,” Jacobs said.
This notion plays out in at least one episode: when Telly Monster is yelping in pain from an injury on the street, Susan pops her head out the window to see what’s wrong and comes to his aid.
Notably, the residents of Sesame Street know one another’s names and roles in the neighbourhood. In reality, less than half of adults in the United States trust their neighbours and roughly one-fourth even know them, figures that have been declining in recent years, according to Pew Research Center.
The show’s designers intentionally made the original set appear grungy, with garbage on the street, the brownstone spotted with soot and the colour scheme appearing dull and muted. “It seemed to me that a street in an urban rundown area would give the children we were most interested in reaching a neighbourhood to identify with,” Stone said in 1970.
And mirroring New York City’s own evolution, Sesame Street got cleaned up over the years, to the dismay of some viewers.
During a major redesign in the ’90s, the set introduced a new hotel and apartment building. The brownstone remained, and one of the show’s designers said it “was meant to look like a survivor of gentrification”.
After the show struck a deal to stream on HBO in 2015, the set appeared even shinier, newer and brighter.
“People felt like moving to HBO was this betrayal of the show’s original mission to be accessible education,” said Abby Whitaker, a “Sesame Street” scholar and a history professor at Brevard College in North Carolina. “And so they saw the two things kind of woven together, that this is the pinnacle of the negative things that gentrification is.”
Last year, HBO Max ended its partnership with the show. But in May, the program announced that it was picked up in a distribution deal with Netflix.
Although the current set is different from the original, it hasn’t been bulldozed or entirely sanitised. The brownstone still appears worn, and pipes and wheat-paste posters are visible. Sal Perez, the show’s executive producer, said it’s important that the neighbourhood doesn’t feel “too polished”.
“We know that monsters and big animals and grouches don’t necessarily live in everybody’s neighbourhoods,” he said. “But with the setting and the way that we tell our stories, we try to be as true to life as we can be.”
The changes reflect evolving social norms. Kale chips now line the shelves in Hooper’s. Oscar, no longer sequestered to just a garbage can, also pops out of recycling and compost bins, an addition that was years before New York’s mandatory composting for residents.
From its beginnings, the show’s emphasis on realism often didn’t extend as deeply to the plotlines. Issues of systemic racism and classism, which led to the urban conditions Sesame Street aimed to address, weren’t typically tackled head-on.
About the time Sesame Street first aired, white people were fleeing cities for suburbs, in a mix of racial prejudice and a postwar housing boom that benefited them. Between 1960 and 1964, a half-million white residents left New York City.
“Where we see increasing segregation in the US city in real life, we see a show that’s presenting this kind of happily integrated, peaceable kingdom of harmony,” said Looker. “The problems residents face are not ones of negligent landlords, redlining, unequal access in educational resources – they’re focused on interpersonal problems.”
That idealism could be a subtle way at touching on such issues. In her memoir, actor Loretta Long, who played Susan, wrote about the significance of her character and Gordon living and owning property on Sesame St. “Not only were we a Black married couple, we also owned that house,” Long said. “We had some strange tenants like Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, and Ernie and Bert. But, we were landlords, which was not the typical case for Black families on television.”
But some Muppets’ storylines did, in fact, render harsher realities – Lily experienced homelessness, and Karli’s mother struggled with addiction.
In 1994, Sesame Street was nearly razed.
A real estate mogul named Ronald Grump arrived on the block with plans to build a glimmering Grump Tower. “From the Grump Sky Cafe – did I mention it rotates? – you can look across the river to my new theme park,” Grump, portrayed by actor Joe Pesci, told residents.
The Muppets rallied and marched in protest to save their home. “We love our street, and we’re not moving!” Big Bird exclaimed.
Eventually, Grump gave up his redevelopment plans. Sesame St lives on.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Anna Kodé
Photographs by: Winnie Au
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