The fictional Walton University from Netflix's Roommates — the teen comedy starring Sadie Sandler and Chloe East as bickering college freshmen — looks like one classic American campus. It's actually a patchwork of real New Jersey locations, and most of them are easy to visit.
The backbone of "Walton" is Drew University in Madison, about 25 miles west of Manhattan. Its 186-acre wooded campus, founded in 1867 on a former estate, mixes Greek Revival, Gothic and neoclassical buildings and earns the nickname "University in the Forest." The dorm exteriors belong to Asbury Hall, one of the school's oldest residence halls — though commenters on the original guide point out the pink-toilet interiors were shot elsewhere, since Asbury was a converted 1834 stable without en-suite anything.
New Brunswick supplies the rest of the collegiate backdrop. The opening establishing shot is Johnson Hall at the Johnson & Johnson headquarters, topped by a 30-foot clock tower. Demarest Hall, a 1950 co-ed dorm on Rutgers' College Avenue Campus, plays Addison Hall, and the library scene was filmed at the Gothic Revival Gardner A. Sage Library of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary — nicknamed the "jewel of the campus." The WaltonCon set is Rutgers' Richard Weeks Hall of Engineering on Busch Campus, an $84 million facility that opened in 2018.
Some spots are surprisingly ordinary. Montclair High School, operating since 1886, hosts the graduation scene. The frosh orientation course looks like the TreeTop Adventure Course at Turtle Back Zoo in West Orange, with aerial obstacles up to 35 feet high. Devon's family home is a real 1887 Victorian in Upper Montclair — seven bedrooms, turret rooms, bought for $745K in 2013 and now valued around $2.2 million. The bar where the girls do shots is Biggies Clam Bar in Carlstadt, a family seafood spot running since 1946, and the liquor store stop was filmed at Liquorama in Kearny.
There are a couple of curveballs. The snowy campus montage leans on stock footage, slipping in the University of Chicago, Hiroshima University in Japan and Harvard's Eliot House. And the "Florida" Spring Break pool party never left the Garden State — it was filmed at the Ocean Place Resort and Spa in Long Branch, a beachfront hotel with ocean-view rooms and indoor/outdoor pools, where nightly rates typically run $250–$350.
For fans, this makes a fun one-day road trip: Madison, Montclair and New Brunswick are all within about an hour of each other, and you can legitimately drink where the cast drank, then finish with a night at the Long Branch resort standing in for Florida.
