New York City

New York City in early 2421.

New York City was a major city center on planet Earth, approximately 790 square kilometers in size, and the terrestrial seat of of the Planetary Union. By the early 25th century, the city had modernized into a metropolis that combined contemporary buildings with older architecture.

Description

In 2418, New York City was a sophisticated metropolis. Commuter pods and an extensive monorail connected the people, skyscrapers both old and new fill the city's skyline, and Central Park and the Statue of Liberty had been preserved. Other notable buildings, such as the Empire State building, the Chrysler building, and the Freedom Tower also remained but they no longer stood out from the skyline, dwarfed by many taller and more elaborate skyscrapers. The Brooklyn Bridge was still in use as well.

Of particular note is Planetary Union Central, the headquarters of the Planetary Union and a skyscraper towering over Central Park.

Pria Lavesque said New York still existed in the 29th century.

Production

A view of New York City from Admiral Tom Halsey's office. Note the green of Central Park peeks from the bottom of the window.

The show's creators knew they would use New York City as host of Planetary Union Central from an early date. "The conceit was that the Union Headquarters in New York was always around Central Park," concept designer Brandon Fayette later remarked.

We pitched this idea of doing gardens everywhere and in the opening shot from the pilot we do that. I pitched starting with the Statue of Liberty and Luke [McDonald] wanted to add a monorail, and as the pod is going through New York the sun is starting to set and it's always about clean buildings. Since the Union Fleet has ships that are very organic, we can't just have buildings that are squared off, so we took a mix of old brownstones and old New York buildings and mixed them in with new buildings like space needle buildings that were more curved.

The creation of the city was done digitally by FuseFX, led by its visual effects supervisor Tommy Tran, over the span of a month. "It was a lot of CG [computer graphics], a lot of in-depth matte paintings with hundreds and hundreds of buildings." Tran elaborated how New York City was designed:

We had to make it all up based on this vision Seth [MacFarlane] had, where everything was clean and pristine. Every balcony had its own lush garden and there was no more poverty. ...We had to use our imaginations to figure out what Seth wanted with this perfect world. We went through a bunch of revisions on our concept of this New York 400 years from now, and we wanted to keep main, iconic buildings there but updated. For instance, there was this one shot where they wanted to use the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge is still there but we added a monorail to the bottom of it, and futuristic paneling to the sides.

For shots of New York City from the perspective of the windows of the Planetary Union Central offices, FuseFX placed a digital matte painting of the city inside the window pane, "brought to life using CG ships and CG pods - lots of air traffic." Tran continued,

It's just a flat, two-dimensional painting of a million buildings - or 600 or whatever number we ended up with. Then we added small nuances, such as moving water, clouds, little ships, little taxis, little transports here and there just to draw the eye to some sort of movement that made our matte painting come alive.

Trivia

• Captain Ed Mercer and Commander Kelly Grayson once shared an apartment on the 54th floor of a skyscraper.
• A month later, a recreation of Mercer's apartment was created by the Calivon as part of their Human zoo exhibit. For a single night, New York City could be seen through the window, although in reality, the city was nothing more than an elaborate simulation.

Appearances

• Episode 1x01: Old Wounds
• Episode 1x02: Command Performance (recreation)
• Episode 1x04: If the Stars Should Appear (mentioned only)
• Episode 1x05: Pria (mentioned only)
• Episode 2x07: Deflectors (recreation)
• Sympathy for the Devil (recreation)