The Inspiration for the “Annie” Orphanage

My movie obsession began at a young age.  I can pretty much pinpoint it to 1982 when Annie premiered.  I was hooked on the musical from the start.  I watched it over and over and over, eventually wearing out the VHS copy that my parents bought me.  Its locations have also served as a longtime fascination.  Ever since taking my second Warner Bros. tour in 2008, I have known that the Hudson St. Home for Girls, aka the orphanage in the film, could be found in the studio’s backlot, on Hennesy Street to be precise.  The façade and the area surrounding it were created by Annie production designer Dale Hennesy specifically for the film.  What I didn’t know up until a couple of years ago, though, was the fact that Dale based his design of the Hudson St. Home for Girls on two real New York buildings.  I learned this bit of information from the Annie Official Movie Souvenir Program which I picked up at the Hollywood Show while meeting Annie herself, Aileen Quinn, in 2012.  As you can guess, I immediately started chomping at the bit to track the buildings down.

Of the orphanage’s inspiration, the Souvenir Program states, “Roughly a year before filming on the street [Hennesy Street at Warner Bros.] actually began, Academy Award-winning production designer Hennesy traveled to New York and combed the Lower East Side for the key structure in the Annie script – the orphanage.  He found two he liked.  One was on Mott Street, just south of Houston, and was now a four-unit apartment building.  The other, near Sixth Street and Avenue B, was actually a former Children’s Aid Society home, built in the late 1880s.  Making a movie in that area would have been difficult and expensive, so it was decided to build on the lot rather than film on location.  The orphanage would combine elements of both buildings, and would be flanked with copies of typical New York structures in their area.”  The studio rendering that Dale created is pictured below.

For all of the trouble he went to creating the Hudson St. Home for Girls, very little of the final product was actually shown onscreen.

As you can see above and below, only very tight shots of the orphanage, mainly focused on the doorway area, were featured in Annie.

Thankfully though, I was extremely familiar with the Hudson St. Home for Girls façade from my many visits to the WB, so I knew exactly what to look for when I started tracking down the New York buildings that served as its inspiration.

The building said to be located near Sixth Street and Avenue B, I pinpointed in a snap.  I simply headed over to Google to do some Street Viewing of the area and found exactly what I was looking for at 630 East Sixth Street.  The picturesque structure at that site features a distinct peaked roof, four levels of angled bay windows (each flanked by a pair of arched windows), and an entrance with a heavy portico situated to the side, all of which match the Annie orphanage to a T.  To top it off, further research informed me that the property did, indeed, used to be a Children’s Aid Society school, as was mentioned in the Souvenir Program.  Voilà!

The Sixth Street School, as the locale was originally known, was constructed in 1888.  Funding for the site, which was designed by Calvert Vaux (the architect and landscape artist who co-designed Central Park) and George Kent Radford, was provided by Emily Vanderbilt Sloane, daughter of William Henry Vanderbilt.  In 1932, the school was transformed into a men’s homeless shelter.  It has since gone through several different incarnations including a women and children’s shelter, a church, and a social services facility.  Today, it serves as a home for those suffering from AIDS and is known as Pencer House.

In 1999, the building’s handsome exterior underwent a restoration process led by Harden + Van Arnam Architects, the result of which is stunning.

You can read a more in-depth history of the site here.

The second building that served as inspiration for the Hudson St. Home for Girls, which the Souvenir Program described as being “on Mott Street, just south of Houston,” was also a snap to find.  I simply headed to Google Street View once again to take a look at the block of Mott Street located immediately south of East Houston Street and spotted the right place within minutes at 256 Mott.  As it turns out, the site was also once a Children’s Aid Society school known as the Fourteenth Ward Industrial School.

The Children’s Aid Society actually built twelve such schools in the 1880s and 1890s, all employing the same Victorian Gothic style.  Only six remain intact today.  Lucky for me, the Annie buildings are two of those extant structures.  The purpose of the Children’s Aid Society schools was to teach trades to homeless and poverty-stricken children in the hopes that they would be able to provide for themselves in adulthood.

The Fourteenth Ward Industrial School was also built in 1888 and was also designed by Vaux and Radford.  The funding was donated by John Jacob Astor III in honor of his wife, Charlotte, who had passed away the previous year.  Today, the structure, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, serves as a residential building.

As you can see, the five-unit, four-story property boasts a peaked roof, angled bay windows flanked by arched windows, and a porticoed door situated off to one side, just like the Hudson St. Home for Girls façade and the Sixth Street School.

Unfortunately, it was undergoing a restoration of some kind while we were there and portions of its façade were covered over with plywood.

You can read a more in-depth history of the building here and here.

I was absolutely thrilled to see, while making screen captures for this post, that Dale Hennesy chose to use 256, the real life address number of the Fourteenth Ward Industrial School, as the address number of the Hudson St. Home for Girls.

Interestingly, not only did the Fourteenth Ward Industrial School serve as inspiration for the Annie orphanage, but it is also a filming location!  The building is where Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher) and Suze (Krysten Ritter) lived in 2009’s Confessions of a Shopaholic.

And it served as Audry’s (Adrienne Shelly) apartment in 1989’s The Unbelievable Truth.  (I apologize for the horrible screen captures below which I got off of YouTube.)

On a side-note – I find it surprising that the peaked roofline of the Annie orphanage, which Hennesy took such care to re-create from both of the inspiration buildings and which is so significant to their architecture, never appeared onscreen.  The screen capture below shows the closest we get to seeing it in the movie.

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Until next time, Happy Stalking!

Stalk It: The Fourteenth Ward Industrial School is located at 256 Mott Street in New York’s Nolita neighborhood.  The Sixth Street School is located at 630 East 6th Street in the East Village.  The façade of the Hudson St. Home for Girls from Annie can be found on Hennesy Street at Warner Bros. Studio, which is located at 3400 West Riverside Drive in Burbank.  Tour information can be found here.

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