Multilingual signage covers Art Deco storefronts along Wilshire Boulevard, and a handful of the buildings behind them have their own screen credits.
What Koreatown looks like
Wilshire Boulevard through Koreatown runs past mid-rise buildings with signs stacked two and three deep in Korean, English and other languages. Many of the storefronts underneath are older than the signs, with Art Deco and terra-cotta fronts still intact behind them. Some of the signs are digital and lit even in daylight, allowed here under a special graphics district that covers only a few parts of the city.
The 's terra cotta tower rises at Wilshire and Western in blue-green Art Deco tiers, built in 1931 and restored after years standing empty and falling apart. A few blocks east, keeps its 1929 Gothic tower and rose window facing the sidewalk. Farther along, the Gaylord building is an apartment tower from 1924. It still has its rooftop sign above a ground floor bar and cafe.
's arched colonnade of storefronts lines Sixth Street at Kenmore Avenue, the building's own name spelled out across its roof. Smaller landmarks fill the blocks between the boulevard's larger ones, among them a green Streamline Moderne medical building with striped awnings and a domed church tower with its own Korean-language banner. Trilingual signs and parked cars line the sidewalks at street level, and a shrine banked with flowers sits behind a brick archway on Kingsley Drive.
Shot in Koreatown
The Ambassador Hotel once stood a few blocks west at 3400 Wilshire. Its own screen credits ran from Bombshell in 1933 to Pretty Woman, and film crews kept working there even after it stopped taking overnight guests in 1989. Bobby was the last production to shoot there, given access in late 2005 to film establishing shots while parts of the hotel were already coming down. An episode of Angel was the last thing filmed in its kitchen before the site was cleared for the schools that stand there now. Three other buildings on this same stretch of Wilshire are still standing and still turning up on screen.
Get Crazy, 1983
The Wiltern during its disrepair years
The Wiltern is the theater inside the Pellissier Building, an Art Deco tower built in 1931 at the southeast corner of Wilshire and Western. Before its restoration in the 1980s, the theater sat vacant and falling apart. Get Crazy used it as its main location during those years, reportedly causing the building further damage.
Helena (So Long and Goodnight), My Chemical Romance, 2005
The church on Wilshire Boulevard
Immanuel Presbyterian Church, a French Gothic Revival building from 1929, has its tower and rose window facing Wilshire Boulevard. Marc Webb shot the funeral scene of My Chemical Romance's video for Helena inside the church in 2005, then returned in 2012 to film part of The Amazing Spider-Man. John Wick, Sister Act 2 and Legally Blonde 2 have also used the building.
Mad Men, episode "Indian Summer"
Played La Trombetta, Manhattan, New York, 1960s
The HMS Bounty occupies the ground floor of the Gaylord, an apartment tower from 1924. Its back room stood in for a Manhattan seafood restaurant called La Trombetta in the Mad Men episode Indian Summer, where Peggy Olson goes on a bad blind date with a truck driver.
Collateral, 2004
Fever's exterior
Played Fever
A nightclub called Cafe Bliss once operated inside the Chapman Market Building, a 1929 Spanish Revival market hall. Its exterior supplied the Fever club in Collateral, where Vincent kills a Korean gangster. The interior was built on a soundstage roughly seven times the size of the real room. The building sits at Sixth Street and Kenmore Avenue, its arched colonnade still lined with storefronts.
The West Argyle Street Historic District, listed on the National Register in 2010, is a lower-rise strip of storefronts that grew up around the Argyle 'L' station after Chicago's elevated line reached Uptown in the early 1900s. Vietnamese, Chinese, Cambodian, Laotian and Thai signage layers over the storefronts today. It is the same layered look that covers Koreatown's own older buildings. Argyle's storefronts sit lower than Koreatown's taller commercial blocks, so a wide shot needs a tighter lens or careful framing to hide the difference in scale. Try searching layered storefront signage now.
Korea Way in Manhattan, New York City
Korea Way is the block of 32nd Street that gives Manhattan's own Koreatown its name. Its early twentieth century office and loft buildings sit under the same stacked signage in Korean, English and other languages that covers Wilshire Boulevard here. The block runs only a few hundred feet, easier to dress end to end than a longer stretch of storefronts. Korea Way runs narrower and taller than Wilshire, so frames need to stay tight on the storefronts rather than pulling back to the street's width, which looks like a Los Angeles boulevard rather than a Manhattan block. Try searching stacked storefront signage now.
Clement Street in San Francisco, California
Clement Street's two-part commercial blocks went up between the 1890s and the 1910s, storefronts below and offices above. Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean signage has covered them since Asian-owned businesses moved in after the Second World War. Many of the original storefront details have since been altered or removed. Clement Street's facades are plainer and more altered than Koreatown's, so this is a looser match that works best in a tight frame skipping the upper floors. Try searching altered storefronts commercial blocks now.
