Brooklyn looked a little more artisanal than usual the other week when a South Williamsburg intersection served as the set of Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming Cinemax show The Knick, a period drama starring Clive Owen as a doctor at downtown’s Knickerbocker Hospital in the pre-antibiotic early 1900s. “They put dirt down, changed all the signs, and had horses and buggies everywhere,” says photographer Ramon Palacios-Pelletier, who stumbled upon the shoot by accident when he turned the corner of Hooper Street and Broadway that morning. “There were probably around 200 extras in period dress.” Those actors weren’t merely for decoration: “They needed them to block things”—like bystanders in Nikes and the odd twenty-year-old Toyota—“from the camera’s view,” says Palacios-Pelletier. “They didn’t shut down the whole block, so they had to let some traffic through.”
*This article originally appeared in the November 25, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.