Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos Say Goodbye to Live Studio After 37 Years: ‘Our Kids Grew Up Here’

It was an emotional day on the set of Live with Kelly and Mark, as the long-running daytime show filmed its last episode at its Upper West Side studio before moving to the show’s new downtown home.

The location — 7 Lincoln Square, at 67th St. and Columbus Ave. — has been Live’s base of operations for 37 years. It’s seen multiple hosts over the years, starting with Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford.

Kelly Ripa joined in 2001, and after Philbin’s exit in 2011, has hosted alongside Michael Strahan and Ryan Seacrest. She currently co-hosts the show with her husband, Mark Consuelos.

Though Consuelos has only been an official co-host since April 2023, the couple tells PEOPLE that the studio has meant so much to them over the years.

“Our kids grew up here,” Consuelos tells PEOPLE, in an interview last month, moments after taping Live with Kelly and Mark’s final episode in the space (it aired on April 1). “They’d come visit mom here a lot — they were always backstage, even when they were babies.”

Ripa and Consuelos, both 54, share three kids: Michael, 27, Lola, 23, and Joaquin, 22.

“They came to work with me every day until they went to school,” recalls Ripa. “They would go to All My Children with me, they would come here with me… we meant when we say they grew up in this building, in these four walls.”

“You have to remember, I had my kids back in a time when maternity leave was not really a thing; we didn’t really know how to negotiate that or navigate that,” she adds. “But the good news is you could bring your kids to work with you. And because they’re very mindful of our hours here — as it is a live morning television show — I was able to be a full-time working woman and a full-time mother simultaneously, which is a very rare thing and not something I take for granted at all.”

Being at the studio all the time didn’t just tie the Consuelos children to the space.

“Some of our closest friends are people that work here,” said Consuelos. “We’re a family at Live, and growing up, those were some of the people our kids were closest to.”

“Yeah, my kids have full text chains with some of the people here,” Ripa notes. “Like, Lola doesn’t look at some of our producers as producers; she looks at them as other moms. These are moms she and my sons can go to if I’m on set if there’s an emergency. So there’s a lot of that.”

There’s another reason the Live studio means a lot to Ripa and Consuelos. The space brought them together — literally.

Back in 1996, before the pair married, they broke up. But days later, they found themselves in the Live with Regis and Kathie Lee studio to appear as surprise guests for an All My Children fan the show was surprising on their Mother’s Day special.

“We had to be here,” Consuelos recalls to PEOPLE. “And we both tried to get out of it, but we both ended up being here on this stage.”

Turns out, appearing on the show together helped the pair realize they had made a mistake. “Obviously, seeing her it was like, ‘This is the worst decision of my life. I have to be with her forever,’ ” Consuelos says. “And I asked her to marry me and we flew to Vegas the next day.”

“Isn’t that wild?” Ripa says. “So we owe a lot to this place. And it’s going to be hard to replicate.”

Live with Kelly and Mark is one of the last ABC shows to move to 7 Hudson Square, the Walt Disney Company’s new N.Y.C. headquarters.

Called The Robert A. Iger Building, the space has multiple studios — two of which are already occupied by The View and The Tamron Hall Show. The network’s other Big Apple staple, Good Morning America, is expected to make the jump by the end of the year.