1970 Sesame Street: My Digital Recreation

My father worked for Children's Television workshop through the 1970s, starting as a public relations consultant and as the speechwriter for Joan Ganz Cooney, the founder of CTW and, basically, the creator of Sesame Street. He was involved in the earliest stages of the show's creation and evolution in 1969-1970, when the idea of publicly-funded programming for children that was firmly grounded in academic principles of pre-school education (as well as a sociological and political/economic understanding of the needs of modern children, particularly in inner cities, where television often took the place of parenting or schooling). Dad worked closely with Cooney and others to develop the presentational materials that were used to draw attention to the project and even attended the White House Conference on Children and Youth in 1970. Sesame Street was very much a product of the social upheavals of the late 'Sixties, and its ideas and methodology (including the Marshall McLuhan-esque idea of creating "advertisements" for the numerals and letters of the alphabet which "sponsored" the show), while commonplace today, were groundbreaking and revolutionary at the time. Also, not least, Sesame Street introduced the world to Jim Henson's Muppets (which, to Joan Cooney's decades-long chagrin, could at one time have been bought outright by CTW but were not).

In 1971 or 1972 my father brought me to Sesame Street to see the set and meet the cast. It was, to say the least, an unforgettable experience. I still vividly remember our first arrival there, on a rainy day, heading East on 81st street to the grimy, windowless side-door (the Vaudville Theater's original exit door) which was opened from the inside (by some mysterious pre-arranged signal) and gave on a dark corridor of black-velvet draperies that led to a brilliantly-lit space where I saw something that blew my mind for good. I had been expecting to visit a street (the actual, fictitious place I imagined that I was seeing on our black-and-white television), but, instead, I was inside a brilliantly-lit room where the vividly-colored buildings had been (apparently) re-built at an arbitrary angle and surrounded by painted backdrops and dozens of pieces of theatrical equipment. I was allowed to wander around the set for a long time, looking up-close at the wooden construction, the painted sidewalk, the plastic trees, and at some point it fully sank in that this was Sesame Street -- that the imaginary, sunlit stretch of Harlem I was so familiar with was where I was standing at that moment. I went back several more times, but I think that first visit was one of the most important moments of my childhood; an entire raft of cinematic and architectural ambitions and obsessions (which still burden me now) were ignited on that day.

In April 2006 I visited the New York State Museum in Albany (with my friend Brendan Kennedy and his daughter Annabella), where the original 1970 "123 Sesame Street" building façade is on exhibit, along with a display panel depicting a reproduction of one of the original construction blueprint floor plans. At that time, I was just beginning to teach myself digital CGI modeling and rendering (I had not yet done my animated "Buehrig Design" film (for the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum's gallery of my grandfather Gordon M. Buehrig's revolutionary car-design methods) and the Sesame Street facade and plan (which I photographed exhaustively on that day) were the basis for my first large-scaled Maya project, a full reconstruction of the original Sesame Street set.

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