They Filmed 'Severance' in My Hometown
Let's get breakfast at Pip's
I grew up in a small town in New York called Rosendale, which is the next town over from Kingston, a larger town on the western bank of the Hudson River. It’s about two hours north of New York City. Kingston and the surrounding area is a filming location for Severance, the best show on TV at the moment.
Kingston and the woods around it have always been a tourist/second home/relocation destination for people from New York, but in the past decade or so and accelerating dramatically during the pandemic, the volume of the movement and the style of person has changed. Things used to be more hippieish, but as college-educated millennial New Yorkers approach middle age and leave the city, they are changing Kingston in their image. Severance filming in Kingston is part of this trend. College-educated millennial (former) New Yorkers like myself love Severance.
Severance films all over the Hudson Valley, on soundstages in Brooklyn, and at the Bell Labs building in New Jersey, but many of its most notable locations are places in Kingston and other nearby parts of Ulster County. The instant classic fourth episode of Season 2, “Woe’s Hollow,” was filmed at the Minnewaska State Park Preserve, a beautiful nature preserve near Mohonk, another filming location. John Turturro’s character lives in a townhouse complex on the Kingston waterfront where my cousin used to live. Something in Season 2 was filmed in Rosendale, but the episode hasn’t been released yet.
But I want to focus on two locations in the Kingston area: Pip’s, the diner where Mark met with Petey in Season 1 and with his sister in Season 2, and the door factory where Dylan had a job interview in Season 2.
In real life, Pip’s is the Phoenicia Diner, a famous restaurant about 25 miles up Route 28 from Kingston. The Phoenicia Diner is ground zero for the region’s current wave of gentrification. It was the first Instagrammable restaurant serving elevated versions of comfort food in the area, and it’s become a destination for anyone visiting. It’s a controversial place, though, because it’s not for a lot of the people who were already living there — who, whether they’re blue-collar types, artist types, or both, often harbor some resentment toward the more affluent newcomers. A co-author of the Phoenicia Diner Cookbook whose husband had been the chef pissed a lot of people off in the summer of 2020 when she wrote a New York Times op-ed cluelessly complaining about all the new people who’d moved to Kingston, as if she was the only person living there correctly. She had moved to town in 2016. The Phoenicia Diner is kind of an inauthentic place that sells an idealized vision of “upstate” to urbanites pretending to be rustic. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this business model, I’m just describing what I see. I love the food there. I even have the cookbook. And it’s a very photogenic place. The restaurant’s owner used to build sets for movie and TV productions. It’s no wonder that Ben Stiller felt he had to film there. It already had Severance’s clean and uncanny retro-futurist-pastoral aesthetic.
The other location is the exterior of a building I had passed by a million times without ever giving it any thought but immediately recognized when I saw it on Severance. The show even digitally recreated the building’s tastefully understated metal lettering, changing the sign from “Wonderly’s” to “Great Doors.” I never considered what might be inside the Wonderly building, but when I looked it up for this article, I found that it’s the perfect encapsulation of how Kingston has changed.
The building used to be the factory for Wonderly’s, a family business that made draperies and bedspreads for hotels. The Wonderlys probably knew my grandfather and uncles, who used to have a carpet store in Kingston (big shoutout to Colonial City Carpet). Wonderly’s closed sometime between 2020 and 2023, and a vintage market called the Red Owl Collective moved in (the name came from rearranging letters on the old Wonderly’s sign, which is charming). Like so many other places in America, Kingston has undergone a shift from an industrial to a service economy. The factories have turned into stores where tourists can buy cute clothes and homegoods. Vintage reselling doesn’t replace the working class jobs lost, but if you come to Kingston and think it would be fun to visit Severance filming locations, it’s nice that you can go inside one of them and buy some quirky knick-knacks. I’ve never been to the Red Owl Collective, but I’ll check it out next time I’m home. I embrace the new Kingston while having mixed feelings about it.
Kingston has always gone through boom-and-bust cycles as its economy changes and people migrate in and out. IBM, Kingston’s version of Lumon, left town in the ‘90s, and it’s taken this long for the economy to reorient itself. Tourism and film production have both been important parts of it, as has the influx of new residents with money to spend. It’s become a tougher place to live if you’re poor, but it’s overall more pleasant and energetic than it was when I was growing up. The new residents are giving the town a positive new identity that isn’t defined by post-industrial malaise. They’re also making economic inequality worse, and the communities that have always struggled are getting left behind. I’m so of two minds about the whole thing that you’d think I’d undergone the Severance process.
-In honor of the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary festivities, I ranked the 50 greatest SNL cast members of all time. I’ll give you a freebie, Julia Louis-Dreyfus is #50, but you’ll have to click all the way through to find out who’s #1. You can probably guess, though. Norm’s #22. I’ll be reviewing the anniversary special itself for TheWrap, so keep an eye out for that on Sunday/Monday.
I was born at Kingston Hospital, where my mother worked. My aunt worked at Benedictine. My grandfather installed many of the telephone poles in the early 1900's. My early years were spent on Brewster St. My father had a shop on Broadway and was a member of the Coach House Players. Things have changed a lot in that town since those days.
Thanks for your post. I have lived in Tillson for 32 years, and was thrilled to see the Testimonial Arch on Severance tonight. I love that Wonderly's building too! I walk past it quite often and noticed how they rearranged the letters. You're right, so charming! Next to it is the bar (old name?) that used to have life-sized statues of the Blues Brothers (was Elvis there too?) on the roof. Now it's called Tubby's (a Kingston NY local surname, there was a pretty well known 19th c. painter named Joseph Tubby). Anyway, Tubby's is a cool venue for live music. My son has seen some good gigs there, and I saw Wreckless Eric (iykyk) there last fall. With the Ulster Performing Arts Center just opposite Tubby's on Broadway, this is a terrific little intersection in Kingston.