Late in Twin Peaks Part 3 on Showtime, there is a short six-second establishing shot of the William Penn statue on top of City Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Similar to other establishing shots from Season 3 (such as Diane Evans’ apartment exterior or Yankton Federal Prison), this shot was footage captured by someone else.
To identify the footage, I first searched Getty Images where I previously found several stock footage clips. No luck. I also looked at several other stock footage websites but couldn’t find a shot that matched.
After much thinking, I realized it must have been captured using a drone. I searched, “philadelphia city hall william penn drone video” which directed me to an article on PhillyMag.com from November 2015.
Titled, “WATCH: City Hall Drone Footage Captures Rarely-Seen View of William Penn,” the article describes how Chad Aaronson, the guy who created Jersey Drone on YouTube, “got a sweeping view of [Philadelphia’s] seat of government and its long-standing silent icon.”
The video was published on November 16, 2015. See it below (the footage used in Twin Peaks is around the 13-second mark).
For the episode, it appears they color corrected it to match the rest of the series.
The short scene ends up Gordon Cole and his team huddled around a desk at “FBI Headquarters, Philadelphia, PA.”
I believe this scene may have been shot at a building in Los Angeles, California (more on that another time once I confirm some details).
Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen an establishing shot for Philadelphia. In Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, there is a short transition image of the Liberty Bell before cutting to the interior of the “FBI Office.”
My gut tells me that this short transition is also stock footage. I can’t imagine a crew being sent to Philadelphia just to capture this brief shot. Finding matching footage is proving more challenging since it was shot on film and a digital record may not exist today. But I will keep trying to locate it.
The “FBI Office” in the film was shot at now demolished Cabrini Hospital at 967 Boren Ave in Seattle, Washington.
