A Dispatch from the Real-Life Creepy Town in 'Severance'
Visiting the real sites of Kier, from the birthing center and Woe's Hollow to Irv's apartment and the Great Doors factory.
On a recent temperate evening, I went for a gentle hike in one of the most beautiful spots near where I live in New Paltz, New York: the Mohonk Preserve Testimonial Gateway. It’s a distinctive little structure, with a small stone arch just big enough for a car to drive underneath, and an attached two-story watchtower. It’s as if someone plunked down a small piece of castle at the start of a hiking trail. I learned from a plaque affixed to it that it was a 50th anniversary gift to Albert Keith Smiley and Eliza Phelps Smiley in 1907. That might seem weird, but it’s standard for the Smileys, the Quaker family that bought 300 acres of land and an inn in the area in 1869, turned the inn and its surroundings into what’s now the Mohonk Mountain House Resort and made the rest a nature preserve. They loved a castle-like monument—the most famous is the Skytop Tower nearby.
But the Testimonial Gateway might be better known, at this point, as the entrance to the Lumon Birthing Center on Apple TV’s puzzlebox sensation Severance, which is wrapping up its second season today. It’s one of several sites near where I live in the Hudson Valley that have been featured on the series, standing in for the fictional town of Kier, where the biotech corporation Lumon looms over everything. The show follows a set of workers—Mark S. (Adam Scott), Helly R. (Britt Lower), Dylan G. (Zach Cherry), and Irving B. (John Tuturro)—at the center of Lumon’s “severed” floor, where employees’ brains are split into work and home selves, neither knowing anything about the other.
There’s something uniquely strange about seeing familiar local locations on such a creepy, trippy, obsession-inducing show. Spotting the Testimonial Gateway in season 1, for instance, felt like finding out someone shot your favorite show in your own living room and didn’t tell you. It’s two miles from my house. I pass it all the time, on my way to yoga or to hike or to rock climb. My recent visit even happened to coincide with its second appearance on the show, in a major moment of this season’s penultimate episode. There it was on screen, a mere four hours after I’d visited it, making me feel as if I was in some kind of Lumon simulation.
I recently visited the show’s several local sites just outside New Paltz and in Kingston, a larger town 14 miles north that often stands in for Kier and is home to, among other settings, Irv’s apartment and the Great Doors factory where Dylan interviews for a job. Here, my tour, infused with a fan’s knowledge of Severance and a local’s insight. In Severance fashion, it’s split into two parts: the city section in Kingston and the ORTBO (Outdoor Retreat and Team Building Experience) of the Testimonial Gateway and Lake Minnewaska, a.k.a. Woe’s Hollow.
After the paywall, subscribers can see the Severance sites in Kingston, the Mohonk Preserve, and Minnewaska State Park.