Game of Thrones is regaled for many of its great qualities – captivating performances, crazy plot twists and impressive sets. But you don’t need to travel to Dubrovnik or Ireland to recreate that Game of Thrones scene. We found 8 Game of Thrones style buildings in New York City.
Belvedere Castle
Belvedere Castle was originally built as a shell with open doorway and window openings. Starting in 1919, it housed the New York Meteorological Observatory, which had been taken over by the United States Weather Bureau in 1912. The current weather station in Central Park, an Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS), is located immediately south of the castle, though wind equipment is still located on the main tower. The main tower was given a more medieval design, with a weather antenna on top, but during the castle’s 1983 renovation, the tower was restored to a German style with a flag, a weather vane, and an anemometer on top. The two fanciful wooden pavilions deteriorated without painting and upkeep and were removed before 1900.
The Castle serves now as a visitor center and gift shop. Free family and community programs hosted at Belvedere Castle include birding and other Central Park Conservancy Discovery Programs for families as well as a variety of history and natural history programs led by NYC Urban Park Rangers, including stargazing/astronomy and wildlife-education events.
Originally, the castle faced a rectangular receiving reservoir; today, it overlooks Turtle Pond and the Great Lawn.
The Cloisters
The Cloisters is a museum in Fort Tryon Park in Washington Heights, Upper Manhattan, New York City, specializing in European medieval architecture, sculpture and decorative arts, with a focus on the Romanesque and Gothic periods. Governed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it contains a large collection of medieval artworks shown in architectural settings sourced from French monasteries and abbeys. Its buildings are centered around four cloisters—the Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefont and Trie—which, following their acquisition by American sculptor and art dealer George Grey Barnard, were dismantled in Europe between 1934 and 1939 and relocated to New York. They became part of the Metropolitan Museum’s collection when they were acquired for the museum by financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr.. Other major sources of objects were the collections of J. P. Morgan and Joseph Brummer.
The museum’s building was designed by architect Charles Collens, on a site on a steep hill, with upper and lower levels. It contains medieval gardens and series of indoor chapels and thematic display spaces, including the Romanesque, Fuentidueña, Unicorn, Spanish and Gothic rooms. It holds approximately five thousand works of art and architecture, all European and mostly dating from the Byzantine to the early Renaissance periods, namely during the 12th through 15th centuries. The varied objects include stone and wood sculptures, tapestries, illuminated manuscripts and panel paintings, of which the best known include the c. 1422 Early Netherlandish Mérode Altarpiece and the c. 1495–1505 Flemish Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries.
Kingsbridge Armory
The Kingsbridge Armory, also known as the Eighth Regiment Armory, is located on West Kingsbridge Road in the New York City borough of the Bronx. It was built in the 1910s, from a design by the firm of then-state architect Lewis Pilcher to house the New York National Guard’s Eighth Coast Defense Command (258th Field Artillery Regiment after November 1921), a regiment-sized unit which relocated from Manhattan in 1917. It is possibly the largest armory in the world.
In addition to its military function, it has been used over the years for exhibitions, boxing matches, and a film set. After World War II the city offered it to the United Nations as a temporary meeting place. In 1974 it was designated a city landmark, and eight years later it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its military use ended and it was turned over to city management in 1996. Since then it has remained vacant as various proposals to redevelop it have failed. One such proposal, by the administration of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, turned into a dispute over living wage policies. In 2013, a new plan to redevelop it as the world’s largest indoor ice center was announced, called the Kingsbridge National Ice Center. One National Guard unit has continued to use an annex in the rear until a new headquarters can be found.
4720 Grosvenor Avenue
This ten-room castle, designed in the French provincial style in 1926 by architect Frank J. Forster, is located in the privately owned Fieldston community in the Bronx, and is listed for $3.65 million. Since it’s for a castle, the listing is able to include such delightful phrases as “tall oak double doors with forged ironwork” and “Enjoy your whimsical breakfast room in the turret of your kitchen.” You don’t see that very often. And, like any good castle, there’s an intercom controlled by an iPad and six sound systems. Not only that, but it’s about half a mile from the subway.
New York Public Library – Jefferson Market
The Jefferson Market Branch, New York Public Library, once known as the Jefferson Market Courthouse, is located at 425 Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue), on the southwest corner of West 10th Street, in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York City, on a triangular plot formed by Greenwich Avenue and West 10th Street. It was originally built as the Third Judicial District Courthouse from 1874 to 1877, and was designed by architect Frederick Clarke Withers of the firm of Vaux and Withers.
Faced with demolition in 1958, public outcry led to its reuse as a branch of the New York Public Library. The building is now part of the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission’s Greenwich Village Historic District, created in 1969. The AIA Guide to New York City calls the building “A mock Neuschwansteinian assemblage … of leaded glass, steeply sloping roofs, gables, pinnacles, Venetian Gothic embellishments, and an intricate tower and clock; one of the City’s most remarkable buildings.”
Grace Church
Grace Church is a historic parish church in Manhattan, New York City which is part of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. The church is located at 800-804 Broadway, at the corner of East 10th Street, where Broadway bends to the south-southeast, bringing it in alignment with the avenues in Manhattan’s grid. Grace Church School and the church houses – which are now used by the school – are located to the east at 86-98 Fourth Avenue between East 10th and 12th Streets.
The church, which has been called “one of the city’s greatest treasures”, is a French Gothic Revival masterpiece designed by James Renwick, Jr., his first major commission. Grace Church is a National Historic Landmark designated for its architectural significance and place within the history of New York City, and the entire complex is a New York City landmark, designated in 1966 (church and rectory) and 1977 (church houses).
St. Patricks Cathedral
The Cathedral of St. Patrick is a decorated Neo-Gothic-style Roman Catholic cathedral church in the United States and a prominent landmark of New York City. It is the seat of the archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York as well as parish church, located on the east side of Fifth Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets in Midtown Manhattan, directly across the street from Rockefeller Center, facing the Atlas statue. It is considered one of the most visible symbols of Roman Catholicism in New York City and the United States.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral is the largest decorated Neo-Gothic-style Catholic cathedral in North America. The cathedral, which can accommodate 3,000 people, is built of brick clad in marble, quarried in Massachusetts and New York. The main block of the cathedral is made of Tuckahoe marble. It takes up a whole city block, between 50th and 51st streets, Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue. At the transepts, it is 174 feet (53.0 meters) wide and 332 feet (101.2 meters) long. The spires rise 330 feet (100.6 meters) from street level. The slate for the roof came from Monson, Maine.
44 Gramercy Park North
One look at this medieval-style mansion and you’d think it was straight out of the Game of Thrones. Or, at the very least, you would date it as a 19th-century Tudor Revival. But, in both cases you would be wrong. Don’t let the stained glass and Gothic statuary fool you — this $6.25M three-bedroom is not even a former-church-turned-condo. Nope, it is just a humble prewar apartment built in the 1930s. Located at 44 Gramercy Park North, the facade of the building suggests nothing more than your typical fancy doorman/elevator co-op off Gramercy Park.
Enter the interior of this two-unit combo on the 12th floor, however, and its architectural details will awe you. The place is full of curling mahogany woodwork, elaborate crown moldings, carved statues and soaring limestone archways. All of this is the vision of the building’s original owner and developer who commissioned the building’s architects to create this opulent residence for him to occupy.
