A Peek Inside Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, Where ‘Sesame Street’ Characters and Other Whimsical Puppets Are Designed

Every weekend, the magical workshop opens its doors for the public to see how legendary film and television characters are made

Kristin Hunt | Freelance writer

July 2, 2026 8:00 a.m.

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Standing in front of a small crowd of Muppet enthusiasts, actress and Sesame Street veteran Jennifer Barnhart demonstrated how to perform with three different types of puppets.

First came Tillie, a small hand-and-rod puppet with an orange mane and a passion for gardening, despite her seasonal allergies. A rod puppet shaped like a hot dog popped up next, lamenting the winter gear he’d packed for his trip to New York City—and his lack of foresight about the rats and pigeons. But Bob, a spotted bear, was the real showstopper. A live hand puppet, Bob was the biggest of the group and required assistance from a member of the audience. An excited 6-year-old volunteered, thrusting her arm inside Bob’s left hand and trying her best to match Barnhart, who was moving Bob’s right hand and head while checking the monitor at her feet.

“Then we can also do a nice big expansive gesture,” Barnhart instructed her young pupil. “So try to match my hand. You go out away from the body, then we go into the body. That was good!”

This interactive tutorial is included in every tour of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, the New York City site where Sesame Street characters and other whimsical creations are designed, molded and dressed. The workshop is open to the public for the first time in its 63-year history, offering fans a peek behind the fleece. The Creature Shop is in Queens, inside the former Standard Motors building, a two-block-long behemoth with high ceilings and freight elevators capable of accommodating even the biggest birds.

A traveling workshop

But this is hardly the studio’s first home. Henson moved his office and workshop to New York in 1963, having built a name for himself in Washington, D.C. as the co-creator, with his wife, Jane, of WRC-TV’s Sam and Friends. The late-night series, a lead-in to The Tonight Show, was where Henson introduced Kermit the Frog and workshopped the type of sketch comedy he would integrate into Sesame Street in 1969 and The Muppet Show in 1976. Henson landed these projects—and, eventually, several Muppet movies and the 1983-87 series Fraggle Rock—after becoming a fixture on television, the emerging medium that fascinated him as a boy. By the early 1960s, his creations appeared not just on Sam and Friends, but on variety shows and in popular commercials he and Jane created for clients like Wilkins Coffee. Those ads usually ended with one puppet, Wilkins, blowing up or bashing another puppet, Wontkins, for refusing to try the product.

Henson’s puppets “had the zany humor of the counterculture. They were not tied to all of the marionettes and the more wooden, traditional puppets that somebody who studied puppetry would have grown up with,” Ryan Lintelman, curator of the entertainment collection at the National Museum of American History, explains. “Instead, they were made for television.”

To keep building on his early television success, Henson first chose workshop space on 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, just blocks from the studios where the Today show and other nationally syndicated series filmed. Henson’s creatures were already making regular appearances on several variety and talk shows, and the puppeteer “wanted to be convenient to where he was doing the work,” says Karen Falk, archives director for the Jim Henson Company.

Some of Henson’s earliest collaborators, including Frank Oz, Jerry Juhl, Jerry Nelson and Don Sahlin, followed him to this workshop. By the time they were ready to graduate to longer-form projects like TV specials, however, they had outgrown the 53rd Street space.

The expanding company next moved into an old carriage house at 227 East 67th Street. That also soon proved inadequate as Sesame Street became a popular hit following its 1969 debut. Henson’s old friend Jon Stone, who was tapped to direct the children’s series early in its development, had urged his boss, Joan Ganz Cooney, to incorporate the Muppets into the program. So Henson leased additional space up the block at 201 East 67th Street in 1973. Then, just four years later, he bought an entire building on East 69th Street that would become known as “Muppet Mansion.” It featured, among other custom pieces, an elaborate reception desk with gilded Miss Piggy figurines and a stained-glass window depicting Henson and Oz puppeteering Bert and Ernie.

“It was one of those places where you just walked in and your breath was caught,” Jason Weber, creative supervisor of the Creature Shop’s Sesame Street work, recalls. “It was so unbelievable.”

The workshop bounced between those blocks on the Upper East Side for decades, sharing space with the company’s offices for much of that period. The Jim Henson Company had also established Creature Shops in London, where The Muppet Show was filmed, and Burbank, California, to support its work in Hollywood. But after the sale of the Muppets to the Walt Disney Company was finalized in 2004—a tumultuous negotiation that began months before Henson’s 1990 death—Falk says, “there was a regrouping and a decision made to really focus on the Creature Shop work in New York.” The puppet builders briefly occupied space in downtown Manhattan. Weber, who joined the company as a freelancer in 1985, remembers the workshop as “a wonderful ninth-floor floor-through with lots of space, lots of light in the windows.” They moved into their current location at 37-18 Northern Boulevard in Long Island City in 2009.

Behind the scenes

Visitors won’t see a ton of Muppets, now longtime denizens of the House of Mouse, in this workshop. But Henson’s company retained the rights to Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth and numerous other properties in the transfer. Sesame Street characters, which are owned by the nonprofit Sesame Workshop, weren’t part of the Disney deal, either.

The “puppet lounge,” one of the two main stops on the 80-minute Creature Shop tour, is populated with fuzzy, mostly friendly monsters from these movies and TV shows. A collection of Fraggles practically burst off their display table right by the main door, just steps from a cluster of puppets from the 1977 TV movie Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas. Oscar the Grouch may be sporting his trademark scowl, but he’s left space next to his trash can for fans to take photos.

Selfies are restricted in the actual workshop, a chaotic, joyful space that doubles as a tribute to Henson history and the creative process. Fanciful pieces from the company’s heyday, like the Muppet Mansion’s reception desk and stained-glass window, made the move, along with a framed portrait of Kermit the Frog in the style of Thomas Gainsborough’s 18th-century oil painting The Blue Boy. (It’s from the “Kermitage” collection, an ’80s photo series that also cast Gonzo as Whistler’s Mother.) Further into the shop, visitors will find racks of puppets and drawers of eyeballs and mustaches. Pausing at a nondescript corner, our tour guide fished a gigantic cast-iron skillet and pancake out of a bin and tossed them around as if they weighed nothing—and they practically did. The foam props had been used just once, for a Sesame Street bit starring actress Aubrey Plaza.

The whole place is covered in scraps of the various materials the builders use to craft characters. Cookie Monster’s mouthpiece, the tour guide notes, is constructed from a deflated basketball.

“Kermit was made from Jim’s mom’s coat, a green coat that was then cut up and ping pong balls were attached and pupils were drawn on,” says Melissa Creighton, director of the Creature Shop. “That’s the spirit of what we do—using what you have in a creative and surprising way.”

The Creature Shop still builds the puppets for Sesame Street, which films blocks away at the Kaufman Astoria Studios. But the shop’s client list nowadays is wide-ranging. Naturally, there’s plenty of film work—its puppets have appeared in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Where the Wild Things Are, The Hangover and the live-action Jungle Book, among others. Musicians like Lady Gaga and the Avett Brothers have also commissioned custom pieces for their tours; many Deadmau5 helmets come from the shop. Since 1993, it’s pumped out a “fleet” of Coca-Cola polar bears for use at the soda brand’s Atlanta museum and stores in Disney World and Las Vegas. And it has also been involved with recent TV reboots of Henson franchises: Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, the latter of which Falk characterizes as “one of the largest puppet productions ever in the history of mankind.”

Anywhere from eight to 30 people might be working in the main studio space on a given day, depending on the freelancer roster. Cubicles and offices are noticeably absent from the space, and workbenches are spread across the floor and under the large rows of windows.

“Everybody is working together. You can shout from one side of the room to the other when you need someone’s input or to make sure you’re heading in the right direction,” Creighton explains. “The person building the puppet is just across the room from the person making the costume and we’re all right here. That’s what I like about it. It’s very conducive to the type of open, collaborative work that we do. And we have stuff everywhere, in the way that an art studio would have. Everything you’re working on is kind of pinned up and hung all over the place.”

The work that’s come out of this shop—and its sibling locations in London and Burbank—has so thoroughly shaped the national entertainment landscape that Lintelman calls it “the default American puppet style.” Henson puppets are known for their extraordinarily expressive faces and fuzzy texture, achieved through a process called flocking, wherein the carved foam base is covered in glue and electrostatically charged to attract small fibers. The look is familiar enough to inspire parodies like Avenue Q and such a reliable source of nostalgia that Disney’s most recent attempt at rebooting the Muppets, a one-off Muppet Show revival special that premiered in early February of this year, garnered 7.58 million viewers over its first week on ABC and Disney+.

For the people who make these puppets, this is no surprise. Henson’s creations, and those of his successors today, teach toddlers to count and children to feel, all while winking at their parents, who grew up with the same characters.

“I think Jim Henson Company characters endure because there’s so much heart,” Creighton says. “There’s so much genuine heart in that little hand puppet.”

Kristin Hunt | Read More

Kristin Hunt is a senior staff writer for PhillyVoice. She is a history and pop culture junkie, and her work has appeared in Vulture, GQ, Esquire, Mental Floss, Atlas Obscura and other publications.