The Shelley

The Shelley is a five-storey apartment building at 757 South New Hampshire Avenue in the Koreatown neighbourhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. Built in 1928, the building is distinguished by its light brown brick façade, decorative white plasterwork, ornate balconies and wrought-iron details. The main entrance has a projecting awning bearing the name The Shelley, with the street number 757 displayed above the doorway. The building contains approximately 49 apartments and has retained much of its original exterior appearance, including the ornamental stonework above the ground floor and the distinctive balconies overlooking New Hampshire Avenue. It became internationally recognisable through its use in the television sitcom Seinfeld, despite being located more than 2,500 miles from the New York neighbourhood it represents.

The Shelley appears in Seinfeld (1989–1998), where its exterior represents the Manhattan apartment building occupied by Jerry Seinfeld, Cosmo Kramer and Newman. The façade, entrance awning and upper-floor windows appear repeatedly in establishing shots throughout the series, although the characters’ apartments and most of the building’s interior spaces were recreated on studio sets in Los Angeles.

In Seinfeld (1989–1998), The Shelley serves as the exterior of Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment building at the fictional address of 129 West 81st Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld) lives in apartment 5A, across the hallway from his eccentric neighbour Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards), while Newman (Wayne Knight) occupies another apartment in the same building. Much of the series revolves around the characters’ visits to Jerry’s apartment, making the exterior of The Shelley one of its most frequently recurring locations.

The building appears in short establishing shots between scenes, typically showing its entrance, awning or upper-floor windows before the action moves inside Jerry’s apartment. The camera rarely shows the entire five-storey façade, instead concentrating on details such as the decorative balconies, white ornamental stonework and main doorway. The entrance awning is particularly recognisable, with the building’s real name, The Shelley, and the number 757 visible in several shots. During the series, the awning was green, although it was subsequently replaced with a brown version. The original brickwork and balcony decorations have remained largely unchanged.

Despite the repeated exterior appearances, the scenes involving Jerry and his neighbours inside the building were filmed on studio sets. The series was initially produced at Ren-Mar Studios in Hollywood before moving to CBS Studio Center in Studio City, where the apartments, hallways and other interiors were recreated. Even scenes that appear to take place on the street immediately outside Jerry’s building were sometimes filmed elsewhere. In the third-season episode The Parking Space (1992), for example, George Costanza (Jason Alexander) becomes involved in a prolonged argument with Mike Moffitt (Lee Arenberg) over a parking space outside Jerry’s apartment. The street confrontation was filmed outdoors on the studio lot rather than on New Hampshire Avenue. The Shelley therefore provided the recurring exterior identity of Jerry’s New York residence, while the characters’ interactions inside and around the fictional building were largely filmed in controlled studio environments.

Seinfeld (1989–1998)

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