Photo of the Day: Haddock's Hall, Piermont NY

In my blog post yesterday, I discussed Tappan Slote, the water passage at the heart of the Rockland Road Bridge Historic District. That creek, in flowing past Haddock’s Hall, served as the setting of one of the early productions in the motion picture industry.

To simulate the Grand Canal of Venice, the makers of the 1917 film The Hungry Heart spent five weeks building a bridge over this creek, for two days of location shooting by a production crew that drove up from Fort Lee, NJ. In the 1920s, filmmakers abandoned Rockland County and other New York area locations for sunny California.

More than a half century later, a film crew came back to Piermont for Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo. Since then, Piermont has been used to shoot episodes of such TV shows as Law and Order: SVU, The Blacklist, The Following, and Orange Is The New Black.