the Yonkers Public Library, where scenes of town gatherings were shot. The Cottage Place Gardens was used to substitute for the garden-style Mulford Gardens public housing project, as it has since been torn down. Some scenes were also shot at the Yonkers City Hall, within the Yonkers City Council Chambers where those actual events took place. Additionally, Haggis said that Mary Dorman's house was the actual location. Additional Yonkers locations used were The Department of Buildings at 87 Nepperhan Avenue and Oakland Cemetery. Scenes portraying the Dominican Republic were shot in Puerto Rico. Working with the show's art department, graffiti artist Chris Capuozzo, with assistance of his photographer wife Denise Ranallo Capuozzo, who documented the graffiti in Yonkers during the time of the show, created temporary reproductions of period graffiti at the Schlobohm Houses and on Palisade Avenue. Music The show makes an extensive use of Bruce Springsteen music, with Springsteen's music often appearing during scenes that feature Wasicsko. The scenes in the housing projects incorporate period hip hop and rap by acts like Digable Planets and Public Enemy. Steve Earle's song, "When The People Find Out," from his 1990 album The Hard Way, is used in the closing credits. In most of Simon's other works, he has made use of diegetic sound – music that is incorporated within the scenes in a practical way (i.e., musicians playing music, boom boxes playing). In Show Me a Hero, Simon used music to cue the main character Wasicsko with a protagonist's aural identity that has elements of emotion conveyed by Springsteen's early music. The show used a total of 12 tracks by Springsteen. Themes Creator Simon said the appeal of the story was a focus on the disintegration of American politics and its corrosive dysfunctional nature in urban cities. Simon wrote that the series "...addresses class and racial segregation in our society, is more about our calcified political processes than directly relevant to the core grievances underlying current events." Simon said that the show depicts a city that is paralyzed by both fear (of integration) and money (valuations of real estate properties). He saw the story as allegorical of current America with refusal to share and the collapse of civilized behavior (with rage and fury quickly fracturing a city) due to the hyper-segregation of the poor in large WWII era high rise housing projects — ironically not the proposed scattered-site town houses