One of the main reasons for Dolly’s high cost was the problem of depicting New York City in the 1890s. It would not have been possible to film on location in New York in 1968, nor would it have been historically accurate. 

Therefore, Twentieth Century Fox developed a budget for filming Dolly in Rome, Italy. Richard Zanuck balked. “Jesus, you can get away with shooting Cleopatra in Rome,” he told John Gregory Dunne, “but Hello, Dolly! is a piece of hard-core Americana. You shoot that in Rome and the unions back here will raise such a stink you’ll have a hard time getting over it. It would have tarnished the image of the whole picture.”

It was also discovered that shooting in Rome would save them only a few million dollars – hardly worth the trouble.

Lehman considered rehabilitating the old Atlanta set from Gone with the Wind, which was still standing at Desilu Studios.  That idea was vetoed because Fox didn’t want to leave an expensive set standing at another studio.

For a brief while, the production entertained the idea of building 1890’s New York as a miniature (at a cost of around $345,325 dollars). 

Fox next considered building the New York set at their ranch (which was sold in the 1970s and is known today as Malibu Creek State Park).  John DeCuir told the New York Times the set at the Fox ranch would have cost $7 million dollars. “We actually leveled 40 acres including the old How Green Was My Valley set,” he said. “We spent $120,000 leveling the land before we discovered the unions wouldn't let us have workmen report directly to the ranch. After we estimated the cost of transporting everybody from the studio and transporting all the materials, including all the ornate architecture which had to be built in the studio mill and all the time lost in traveling, Dick Zanuck said ‘You're going to do it for a million and a half and you're going to do it in the vicinity of the studio.’”

This was 1967 – years before CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery) effects were possible, which is how the mammoth task of recreating New York City would probably be handled today.  So DeCuir drew up plans for a New York set that would be built on Fox’s main lot in Westwood, between Pico and Olympic boulevards.

“There was no other way,” Gene Kelly declared. “I looked high and low everywhere and could find no place that so much as slightly resembled the Manhattan of 80 years ago.”

Construction on 15-acres of Fox’s backlot began October 23, 1967 and ended up costing the production around $2.25 million dollars. A crew of more than 500 built the set in about four months. American Cinematographer described the set: “It is a complex of 60 buildings involving reproductions of intersections of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, Broadway and Mulberry street, with subsections for Madison Square Park, 14th Street and the Bowery. Involved are re-creations of Tony Pastor’s theatre, the Hoffman House, Fifth Avenue hotel, the Waldorf Astoria and old Grand Central Station.”  They added that, because of logistics, the set “is exact in every tiny detail, but inexact geographically.”

Even part of the Twentieth Century Fox administration building was used as part of the set’s façade – with large klieg lights sometimes perpetually set up inside executives’ offices (because it cost too much to move them in and out each day).

A tall, eleven-story structure on the set actually obscured the view of Century Plaza Hotel, located next door in Century City, from the cameras.  The crew had mistakenly painted the tall billboard with an advert for “Heinz Catsup” until it was brought to their attention that Heinz marketed “ketchup” not “catsup.”  The billboard was repainted.

DeCuir built an elevated railroad station and track out of steel.  An actual steam locomotive was acquired. “We did quite a lot of looking for the locomotive,” DeCuir said. “We finally found the right one on a sugar plantation in Honolulu. It was shipped to us. We got two of the cars from the plantation, too.  They once were used to haul workers. We remodeled them. The summer car was supplied by a railway museum in Strasburg, Pa.”

The early scenes in Hello, Dolly! take place in Yonkers, New York.  But in 1968, the real town of Yonkers did not have many historic buildings left, so the filmmakers chose Garrison, New York instead.  “We scoured the countryside for a town that had a river, a railroad station and looked old-fashioned,” Ernest Lehman explained. “It would have cost us a fortune to build one ourselves.”

Garrison was about 45 miles up the Hudson River from Yonkers with historic buildings that dated mostly from 1840.  The set decorators added gingerbread porches (made of wood and plastic) to the buildings, colorful store fronts, horse-drawn wagons and lamp posts to make Garrison look like 1890’s Yonkers (at a cost of $500,000). Movie painters actually stenciled a red pattern onto Garrison’s asphalt roads to give the illusion of brick.

Col. Taylor “Steamboat” Belcher owned the antique building (the Golden Eagle Inn) that was made into Vandergelder’s Hay and Feed Store. “The village hasn’t changed appreciably in 40 years, except for a coat of paint,” Belcher told the New York Times.  The top floor of the building was covered with the large sign that read “Hay, Grain, and Milled Feeds.” Production added the large water wheel on the right side of the building. For some of the interior scenes at Vandergelder’s that included the Hudson river in the background, a smaller section was built on location in New York. Larger scenes utilizing the entire set were filmed on a replica in Hollywood.  Ermengarde’s bedroom was filmed on the second floor of the Golden Eagle, as was the cellar scene in which Cornelius and Barnaby put candles under the cans of chicken fat.  That scene was actually filmed in the hallway on the third floor of the Inn, with a trap door created in the ceiling – so when Streisand appears above them, she is actually in the attic!

The climax of “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” – in which the cast boarded the train for New York City – took place at the original Garrison Depot building at the train station which serviced the Penn Central railroad line. DeCuir added four brick cupolas to the train station to make it appear more “period.” The cupolas were made of plastic and only finished on the sides that would face the camera. The movie company also utilized the train station’s surrounding buildings, the overpass, and the tunnel just north of the depot.  Since Gene Kelly had planned a helicopter shot at the end of the musical number, care had to be taken not to show the modern cars which were parked at the working train station!  So a period barn was built (for $30,000) which concealed the cars.  The cast could only perform the number in 20-25-minute increments because the modern trains would service the station.

The helicopter shot at the end of “Sunday Clothes” was achieved by Nelson Tyler (using a camera mount that reduced vibrations).  Tyler also created the dynamic helicopter shot at the end of “Don’t Rain On My Parade” in the Funny Girl film.

“Just Leave Everything to Me” was filmed in the glass-roofed Penn Central railroad station at Poughkeepsie, New York on June 22, 1968. The scene in which Barbra hands out business cards, jumps on a cart, then boards the train to Yonkers cost 20th Century-Fox $85,000 for the day.  A Hoboken, New Jersey train station was originally chosen for this scene, but Fox altered the plan so that Streisand and crew could film closer to Garrison, New York (and save money and time!). 

Streisand and Gene Kelly shot the scene, standing in for New York City’s Grand Central Station, on the last day of filming on the East coast, before returning to California where the rest of the film was lensed. “Get the smoke in there,” Gene Kelly commanded, “We need more smoke.  Barbra, get the look of fear off your face as you mount the baggage cart.” It should be noted that three locations were used to represent Grand Central Station: (1) the outside of the station where Dolly begins singing her song was the big New York set on the Fox backlot; (2) the inside of the station where Dolly says she is there “to handle a very personal matter for Mr. Horace Vandergelder” was filmed on a set on the 20th Century-Fox soundstage; (3) the track of the station was filmed in Poughkeepsie.

Tommy Tune also remembered the comedic scene he played with Streisand on the ladder in Garrison, N.Y. “For the elopement scene, there was no rehearsal, because they were supposed to film a scene with Walter Matthau, but it was the day Robert Kennedy got shot, and the news hit Matthau hard. When I saw the scene, I realized we were working through a sadness.”

Rutanya Alda was hired as Streisand’s stand-in for the Yonkers scenes.  “They wanted Barbra fresh as a daisy, so I had to step in whenever a scene called for Barbra’s back.”

Dancer Joan Jaffee recalled the hot summer. “Over 300 New York extras were hired for the final shots in Garrison and West Point. Many of our clothes came from Western Costume and had long legacies of their own, being used in Broadway shows and movies, some since the 1930s. It was so hot during the shooting. Consider how the dresses were made back then. I had on tights, bloomers, a long slip, a skirt over the slip, a bustle, a camisole top, a blouse and sometimes a jacket over that. Guys had pure wool suits – they were in agony.”

Gene Kelly, like an army general in charge of his troops, directed more than 5,000 extras on Tuesday and Wednesday, July 16-17, 1968 on the Fox backlot.  The studio costumed hundreds of young and old well-dressed men, foot policemen, mounted policemen, vendors, women and boys. According to a newspaper report, also called upon were “the UCLA marching band, the 10th Cavalry Troop, high wheel bicycle riders, the Santa Monica City College Coronettes, the Highland Society Bagpipers, Civil War Drummer Boys, the San Fernando Valley Youth Band, the Lodge Marchers, the California High girl gymnasts, three fire vehicles, a group of suffragettes, the Anheuser Busch Beer Wagon and three huge decorated floats.”

“I got a terrible sunburn yesterday,” Streisand told columnist Florabel Muir about working in the hot Los Angeles sun.  “Well, if you took a look at my chest you would see why. I was outside filming all day, filming the parade scenes, and the sun imprinted me with the basket-weave pattern that I have on my bodice – it came right through!”

Reportedly, the cost for this immense scene was around $500,000, including paying the extras, cast and crew, as well as costuming and feeding everyone.  

Photo:  Gene Kelly rides the camera while filming the huge parade scene.