My brother and I were always massive fans of the Ghostbusters franchise. I remember when he was a little kid, he would run around with his proton pack with his buddies in the neighborhood busting ghosts. We watched the two original movies so many times, I’m pretty sure we have them both memorized. One summer, in 2009, we decided that we would create our own tour around New York City, checking out all the filming locations we could find from the original Ghostbusters movie.

For the trip, I ordered a pair of Ghostbusters t-shirts for us to wear while we did our one day whirlwind tour. My brother’s shirt actually glows in the dark which is super sweet. I downloaded the Ghostbusters theme song on my iPhone to play while we were getting ready to go, and boy, were we pumped! We were staying with our Uncle Arunas in Brooklyn, and we had a lot of moving around to do to get to all of the filming sites. One of the most fun parts of the whole tour was when we were near any one of the filming sites, random people would see our shirts and would say, “Hey, cool, Ghostbusters!” or something similar to us. It was fun interacting with people this way, and we felt SUPER cool with our shirts. I most definitely still own this shirt!

We absolutely had to start with the firehouse in the Tribeca neighborhood, even though it did not make sense geographically to start there. But I mean, you just HAVE to start there. The firehouse is actually a working firehouse, located at 14 N. Moore Street, but they have a painted Ghostbusters sign on the ground just outside of it. There were other people there too, on this random day checking out the site. It’s pretty well documented, and the fact that they have the painting on the ground helps draw people there as well. We felt really excited to be at the place where so much of this movie was filmed – or at least the outside of this firehouse anyway.. We snapped a few photos, took a few videos, and some kind people offered to take our photo here as well. Then we got back on the subway and headed north.

We next headed up all the way to Columbia University, where the original Ghostbusters hatched their business plan. We sat on steps at one of the buildings in the quad, and contemplated our fates as Ghostbusters. Columbia has a really nice and lively quad. Because it was June, the weather was just perfect for chilling out here a bit and watching the people go by. Not much was filmed out here, but there is a key scene after Ray and Venkman get fired where they are drinking booze on these very steps and get excited about their plan to bust ghosts!

Next we headed back south towards Tavern on the Green, in Central Park, where Louis Tully was turned into a dog. This restaurant actually closed two months after we took this photo, but has since reopened. Unfortunately, we did not eat lunch there while we were on our tour.

Right across the street was Dana’s apartment building (where she was also turned into a dog) as well as the church right next door that the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man crushed. This building, located at 55 Central Park West, was truly beautiful, although not as tall as it was depicted in the movie. In the movie, it seemed like the building was like 30-plus stories high towering above Central Park. You could see during the movie as the Ghostbusters were climbing the stairs that they were “in the teens” and Venkman said that when they get to 20, let him know, because he was gonna throw up! Dana lived on the 22nd floor. The actual building, however, is only 19 stories high. There are lots of really cool art deco accents on this building that do make it look a little creepy, but it is super beautiful, and is right on the park as well.

Finally, we headed back down to the New York Public Library, where the movie started. While it was not covered with slime while we were there, it was covered in construction netting, but we still got some good shots of the lions out front. This completed pretty much everywhere the movie was shot in New York City.

To celebrate our successful tour, we stopped at a bar where I taught the bartender how to make my signature “Ecto-Cooler” martini. Though not in a martini glass, he did a pretty good job. If you want to make it yourself, it’s 2 parts vodka, 1 part Midori and 1 part pineapple juice. It’s ridiculously delicious. We had a great time creating this tour for ourselves, and I recently discovered that we also actually made videos at each stop, which made me laugh so hard that I cried, but you’ll have to ask me personally if you ever want to see those!