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| Where Was American Horror Story: 13 Filmed? All Filming Locations Revealed. |
American Horror Story: 13 was filmed across New York and New Jersey, with New York City providing much of the season’s urban backdrop and Jersey City supplying additional locations. Filming reportedly began in April 2026 under the working title P3NTHOUSE and continued until late July, giving the production several months to turn familiar city spaces into suitably unsettling pieces of the fictional Apollyon world.
New York City, New York was the main filming base for American Horror Story: 13, and the production made good use of the city rather than hiding everything behind sound stages. That feels particularly fitting for a season built around the mysterious Apollyon, because New York already comes with enough imposing buildings, dark corners and suspiciously dramatic staircases to save a horror production a fair amount of trouble.
One of the clearest locations was John Jay College of Criminal Justice at 524 West 59th Street in Manhattan. During filming in May 2026, the production reportedly occupied parts of the campus and transformed spaces including Hound Square and Cyber Lounge North into an airport terminal. It is a fairly impressive bit of movie magic when a college campus suddenly becomes an airport, although presumably the students did not get much say in the temporary career change.
The John Jay College location also fits the season’s darker atmosphere rather neatly. Its institutional architecture gives the production a functional urban setting that can be dressed and reshaped depending on what the story requires. For American Horror Story, where ordinary places rarely remain ordinary for long, that sort of flexibility is practically an invitation.
The production also moved through SoHo, using streets and corners around the neighbourhood for exterior sequences. Mercer Street and Howard Street were among the locations used during filming, bringing the production into one of Manhattan’s most recognisable areas. The polished galleries, converted warehouses and busy streets of SoHo provide a sharp contrast with the secretive world of the Apollyon, which is exactly the sort of contrast the anthology tends to enjoy.
Another New York location was Riverside Church at 490 Riverside Drive in Morningside Heights. The imposing church and surrounding architecture offer a very different visual texture from SoHo, giving the season another distinctive Manhattan setting. With its scale and historic appearance, the building hardly needs much help looking dramatic. Horror productions can be remarkably efficient that way.
The series also used Fifth Avenue for exterior material, adding one of New York’s best-known thoroughfares to the visual mix. Fifth Avenue runs through several major parts of Manhattan and provides a useful connection between recognisable city imagery and the more contained locations used for the story. In a season centred on a fictional apartment building with plenty of secrets, there is something suitably ironic about placing those secrets in a city where millions of people are constantly passing by.
Madison Avenue also forms part of the reported New York filming footprint. Its streets and surrounding buildings offer another distinctly Manhattan backdrop, helping American Horror Story: 13 maintain the feeling that the supernatural chaos of the story is happening in a real, lived-in city rather than some isolated horror playground.
New York’s landmarks also add plenty of visual context to establishing and aerial shots. The Statue of Liberty, United Nations Headquarters, Times Square, Central Park, the Verrazzano–Narrows Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge and Empire State Building can appear within the wider city imagery associated with the production. They are hardly subtle locations, but that is part of the fun. If you are going to film in New York, you might as well let the skyline do some of the heavy lifting.
For a production such as American Horror Story: 13, those recognisable landmarks serve another purpose. The more familiar the city looks, the stranger it becomes when the story starts introducing the Apollyon and its unsettling secrets. Manhattan does not need to pretend to be somewhere else; it can simply become a slightly more sinister version of itself.
Jersey City, New Jersey was another important filming base for the season. Located across the Hudson River from Manhattan, the city provided additional streets and neighbourhoods for scenes that required a different urban texture. Its mixture of older architecture, modern developments and dense streets gives productions plenty of visual variety without moving too far from New York.
The Jersey City portion of the production is particularly useful because the city can stand in for a wide range of metropolitan environments. For American Horror Story: 13, that means the filmmakers could shift the visual atmosphere while keeping the production within the same wider New York metropolitan setting. It is basically filmmaking's version of changing the furniture and hoping nobody notices.
Jersey City has also appeared in productions across horror, thriller, drama and action, including Smile, You Should Have Left, Amityville II: The Possession, The Toxic Avenger, The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live and Harlan Coben's Shelter. Its cinematic history makes sense once you see the city's mix of waterfront views, dense neighbourhoods and varied architecture.
One additional place worth putting on the American Horror Story: 13 location map is Liberty State Park in Jersey City, particularly because of its striking views across the Hudson towards Lower Manhattan and its proximity to several of the city's established filming areas. It also provides a very different visual environment from the tightly packed streets of Manhattan. However, the material provided here does not establish Liberty State Park as a confirmed filming location, so it should not be presented as one without further production evidence.
There is also a nice bit of behind-the-scenes detail from the shoot. After production wrapped, head tailor Edwin Schiff thanked the costume department and production leadership, praising the team behind the wardrobe work and noting that large numbers of tailors were involved at various points. That gives a small glimpse into how much work went into creating the season beyond what eventually appears on screen.
My take is that the locations sound particularly well suited to American Horror Story: 13 because the production has not relied on one obvious horror setting. Instead, it moves between institutional spaces, busy Manhattan streets, historic architecture and the broader Jersey City landscape.
That variety should make the fictional Apollyon feel less like a bubble and more like something planted directly into the real city. The airport transformation at John Jay College is probably the most amusing example of television production doing its usual trick of convincing us that somewhere is somewhere completely different.
Meanwhile, SoHo, Riverside Church and the Manhattan avenues bring very different moods to the season. There is also something wonderfully American Horror Story about placing unsettling events against landmarks millions of people immediately recognise. New York is already visually dramatic, so the show really only has to turn the lights down and let everyone become suspicious.
For viewers who want to retrace American Horror Story: 13 filming locations, New York City and Jersey City offer plenty to explore, from the streets of SoHo and Morningside Heights to the locations used around 59th Street. The Apollyon itself may be fictional, but much of the world surrounding it comes from very real places. As more production details emerge, this location guide can be updated with additional confirmed filming spots. Which of these locations would you most like to visit, and would you actually recognise them on screen?