On the set of Live with Kelly and Mark, the cherished afternoon program taped its last episode at its long-standing Upper West Side studio before moving to a new location downtown, and it was a touching day. On April 1, the final episode was filmed in the former studio.

The show’s iconic background for 37 years was 7 Lincoln Square, which is situated at the intersection of 67th Street and Columbus Avenue. Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford were the first of many adored hosts to call it home throughout the years.

Since joining the program in 2001, Kelly Ripa has stayed consistent despite several co-host changes, including Michael Strahan and Ryan Seacrest after Philbin left in 2011. She and her husband, Mark Consuelos, who joined the show in April 2023, now share hosting responsibilities.

The couple told PEOPLE that the studio has great sentimental significance for them, signaling the end of an era and the start of a new one, despite Consuelos being a more recent addition to the co-host lineup

“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.”

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.