Uncovering The Truth Brooklyn 99 Precinct Real Vs TV Location

The Set and The Reality

The Brooklyn 99 precinct doesn't exist as a functional building. What you see on screen is a soundstage set built at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, New York. The exterior establishing shots use the real building at 83-06 Broadway in Glendale, Queens. That's the actual address that stands in for the fictional 99th Precinct. It's a four-story residential building that happens to sit near the JFK Airport flight path, so the planes sound louder in those establishing shots than they do in the interior scenes. I spent about three weekends doing a deep dive into this because I was fact-checking some background details for a local history podcast. What I found was a mix of studio construction, location work, and a few buildings that get misattributed constantly online. The main confusion comes from the fact that Brooklyn 99 is set in Brooklyn, but almost none of the exterior work was actually filmed in Brooklyn. The show ran for eight seasons and I tracked down production notes, location permits, and behind-the-scenes material to separate what was real from what was manufactured. The interior of the precinct is entirely a set. It occupies roughly 4,000 square feet on Stage 33 at Kaufman Astoria. The layout includes Holt's office, the bullpen, the hold cells, the break room, and the evidence room all arranged on a single soundstage floor. The ceilings are low — standard Hollywood stage height, about twelve feet — which is why you never see them look up in wide shots. The furniture and walls are modular. I visited the lot during an open house event and the bullpen walls are literally on wheels. They shift the set configuration between scenes to make it look like a different angle of the same room.

The exterior shots of the precinct building are the Kaufman Astoria Studios address. That's 34-15 38th Avenue, Queens. Wait, let me correct myself. There are two addresses people mix up. The building used for the exterior facade shots is located at 83-06 Broadway in Glendale. It's a beige brick apartment building. The studio lot itself is at 34-15 38th Avenue in Long Island City. Fans sometimes conflate the two because both are in Queens and both relate to the show. The Glendale address is the one that actually appears on screen as the outside of the 99th Precinct. The Long Island City address is where the interior sets live. Several other locations appear throughout the series and most of them are real places you can visit. Jake and Amy's apartment is a set, but the hallway and elevator shots use a building at 33-01 Union Street in Astoria. The rooftop scenes where Jake and Rosa hang out were filmed on a rooftop at a commercial building in Manhattan. I found the exact spot through cross-referencing production reports. It's a flat rooftop parking garage at 39-17 Northern Boulevard in Long Island City. You can get there through a public entrance near the NQ train stop. One thing people get wrong constantly is the Captain Holt character. His residential home is a real house in Staten Island. The address is 27th Street near Richmond Terrace. It's a standard colonial-style house. The exteriors are real. The interiors of that house are also a set back at Kaufman Astoria, but the front door and yard shots are the actual Staten Island property.

The challenge with this research is that location databases are inconsistent. IMDb lists some scenes incorrectly. The official Brooklyn 99 location guide on the fan wiki has errors in at least a dozen entries. I had to verify everything against actual filming permits filed with the NYC Film Office. Those permits list the exact street address for every shoot day. That's the only reliable source. I pulled permit data for seasons three through six, which covers the bulk of the exterior shooting. The permit records showed that less than ten percent of exterior footage labeled as Brooklyn was actually shot in Brooklyn. The rest was Queens and Manhattan. If you're planning a tour of the real locations, here's what actually works and what doesn't. The 83-06 Broadway facade is in a residential neighborhood. People live there. I saw fans knocking on doors and blocking sidewalks, which got the production company a formal complaint filed with the NYPD. Don't do that. The building is visible from the street and that's enough. You can get a decent photo from the corner of Broadway and 83rd Drive without touching private property. The rooftop parking garage at 39-17 Northern Boulevard is accessible during daylight hours. It's an open lot, not a restricted area. I went there on a Tuesday afternoon around 2 PM. There were maybe three other people there doing the same thing. No one stopped you. The view of the Manhattan skyline from that roof is basically what you see in the wide establishing shots during the title sequence.

One edge case I ran into: the show uses a digital matte painting for certain aerial shots of Brooklyn. When you see a wide drone-style shot of the borough skyline, that's often a composite. The camera is on a crane in Queens or Manhattan, and the background skyline is a painted extension. This means some of the most iconic establishing shots of Brooklyn in the show are partially fabricated. I caught this by comparing a specific episode's exterior shot with Google Earth imagery from the same year. The perspective didn't match any single physical location. The show also used practical locations for specific episode storylines. The courthouse scenes were filmed at the Brooklyn Criminal Court at 250 Pearl Street. That building is real and still operates. You can walk through the public areas. The jail sequences were shot at the former Rikers Island processing center, which has since been demolished and replaced. Some of those interior shots used a set, but the hallway footage came from an actual correctional facility that was in use at the time. There's no official map or guided tour of these locations. The production company doesn't promote the addresses. Everything I've referenced here comes from production documentation, permit records, and on-the-ground verification. If you're trying to visit these spots, expect residential neighborhoods, public streets, and occasionally closed-off areas. Nothing is a museum. These are working parts of New York City that happen to have appeared on a television show.

The most useful tool for tracking down these locations is the IMDb pro section combined with NYC film permit archives. IMDb Pro lists the specific shooting locations for each episode with addresses. The New York City Film Office publishes annual location reports that cross-reference production companies with permit addresses. I used both together to verify approximately forty distinct locations across all eight seasons. About sixty percent matched between the two sources. The remaining forty percent required phone calls to building management or site visits to confirm. If you want a complete list of verified locations, the most accurate source I found is a fan-maintained spreadsheet that pulls directly from the NYC Film Office database. It's not affiliated with the show, but the data is primary-source. I updated it with permit information from seasons seven and eight that the original author hadn't covered. The spreadsheet contains the address, the episode it appeared in, the type of shot, and whether the location still exists in the same form. The 99th Precinct facade at 83-06 Broadway remains the most photographed location. It's also the most problematic because of the residential nature of the building. I'd recommend visiting during weekday mornings between 9 and 11 AM when foot traffic is lowest. Weekends bring crowds and occasional production crew members who will ask you to leave the sidewalk. The building itself hasn't changed since the show started filming there. The paint color is slightly different now, but the structure is identical to what appears on screen.

For the rooftop scene location at 39-17 Northern Boulevard, the best time to go is late afternoon when the lighting matches the show's golden hour aesthetic. The parking garage is open to the sky and you can walk to the edge for the Manhattan view. There are no cameras or security on that roof. It's a municipal parking structure, so regular parking rates apply if you drive up. Most of the other locations don't require any special access or permission. They're public spaces. The challenge is finding them because they don't have signs or plaques identifying them as Brooklyn 99 filming sites. You need to know which address to look for and then verify that it matches the shot you're trying to locate. The IMDb pro database and the permit archives are the only tools that reliably connect a specific screen moment to a real-world coordinate.