Ghostbusters is a 1984 supernatural comedy directed by Ivan Reitman and written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, who also star alongside Bill Murray and Ernie Hudson as the team of eccentric paranormal investigators at the centre of the story. Set in a New York City overrun by ghosts, possessions and apocalyptic supernatural forces, the film follows the rise of a small ghost-removal business that gradually finds itself facing something far bigger than strange hauntings. What makes Ghostbusters endure is the way it blends deadpan comedy, science-fiction ideas and horror imagery without ever feeling weighed down by any one genre, turning the film into one of the most iconic and widely loved studio films of the 1980s.
Although the film is completely identified with New York, its locations were actually split between New York and Los Angeles in a very effective way. In New York, the production used the New York Public Library, Columbia University, 55 Central Park West for Dana Barrett’s apartment building, and Hook & Ladder Company No. 8 in Tribeca as the exterior of the Ghostbusters’ headquarters. Because that firehouse was an active station, the interiors were filmed instead at the decommissioned Fire Station No. 23 in downtown Los Angeles. Los Angeles was also used for other important interiors, including the library basement scenes at the Los Angeles Central Library and the Sedgewick Hotel material at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel. That combination gives the film a very convincing New York identity on screen, while quietly relying on California interiors and production spaces to build some of its most memorable sequences.
Hook & Ladder 8
Hook & Ladder Company 8 appears in the Ghostbusters franchise, Hitch (2005), Seinfeld, and How I Met Your Mother.