There’s No Better Set Than New York CityAn iconic scene was shot on nearly every corner of the city.
New York is not the easiest place to shoot a movie. (That’s why they invented Hollywood.) The city is crowded, cranky, and expensive. So why do filmmakers keep coming back? Because the city has an energy you can’t get anywhere else: the bebop beat, the sidewalk theater, the sense that the unpredictable is just around the corner. The architecture’s not bad either. As a veteran location scout put it to me, you get millions of dollars in production value just by setting up the camera.
From the early days of silent shorts, the movies have always loved shooting on New York’s streets. The industry’s migration to the West Coast dampened things somewhat — films like Rear Window were made entirely on studio back lots — though even then productions sometimes earmarked a few days to get footage of the actual city. But as cameras got smaller and more mobile, the movies gradually returned to New York. And the city welcomed them, if not quite with open arms (prevent people from parking on select blocks of the Upper East Side and you will hear about it), then at least with an open mind — as well as some attractive tax incentives. The number of features shot in the boroughs every year rose from roughly 70 in the late ’70s (as James Sanders notes in Celluloid Skyline) to more than 300 in 2016.
Consider this map a love letter to the New York of the movies and the hardworking location scouts, production assistants, and other professionals who bring it to life. In blue in the map above, we have pinpointed the past four years’ worth of film permits from the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. (The data came organized by Zip Code; dots have been placed broadly inside the corresponding areas.) In red in the map below, we have highlighted more than 50 special locations from New York cinema history. Some are iconic onscreen moments that require little explanation. Others are the character actors of the cityscape, recurring settings you might never have noticed. And we included places where celluloid preserves a long-vanished incarnation of the city, a record of what certain neighborhoods looked like before they were transformed by money, power, and fashion.
We began this project in February 2020, just before the coronavirus sent us into a quarantined hibernation. But almost two years later, the map feels strikingly appropriate for the COVID era: As the real city shut down, the imaginary version from the movies helped keep the spirit of New York alive.