The numbered streets run downhill to the Narrows. The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge crosses the water at the south end of the neighborhood.
What Bay Ridge looks like
runs along the top of the ridge. Below it there is a strip of park and the Belt Parkway, and then the Narrows.
Most of the streets are two and three storey rowhouses in brick and limestone, built mostly in the 1900s and 1910s, running downhill on numbered streets to the water. Some carry round bay fronts and stoops behind low iron railings.
Doctors' Row is the most continuous of those blocks. Fifty four houses sit on between and , built between 1900 and 1910.
One house on is nothing like the rest. J. Sarsfield Kennedy designed it in 1918 for a shipping executive named Howard E. Jones. It is uncut stone under an undulating shingle roof, and people call it the Gingerbread House.
is a restaurant corridor along the middle of the neighborhood. Fourth Avenue and Fifth Avenue between 67th and 75th Streets carry most of the Arab shops and restaurants. One block has signs in Arabic and the next has Italian restaurants and bars.
South of there the streets keep going down to Fort Hamilton, where the crosses to Staten Island. It opened in 1964. The bridge's Brooklyn anchorage stands on the site of Fort Lafayette, an island fort taken down to build it.
Shot in Bay Ridge
Saturday Night Fever was shot on location in March 1977, most of it here and in Bensonhurst. Tony Manero's house is 221 79th Street and the hardware store he works in was 7305 Fifth Avenue. The house on Blue Bloods is 8070 Harbor View Terrace at the corner of 82nd Street, and a shot of it opens the Sunday dinner in every episode.
Saturday Night Fever, 1977
Played the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge
The gang stop the car in the middle of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and dance along the edge of it. Later in the film Bobby C falls from the same place into the water. They worked at night in early March, when the steel iced up, so John Badham blocked the scene with the actors crawling along the beam for safety.
Saturday Night Fever, 1977
Played the Bay Ridge promenade
Tony brings Stephanie to the promenade in Shore Road Park after they argue in the car. They sit on a bench near the bridge while he recites statistics about it. The benches have been replaced since.
San Pedro's bluff streets look out over its own suspension bridge, the Vincent Thomas Bridge. It was built in 1963, a year before the Verrazzano. Point Fermin and Vista del Oro give hillside views of the harbor and the bridge together, the same pairing Bay Ridge has from Shore Road. San Pedro's houses run to bungalow and craftsman rather than Bay Ridge's brick and limestone rowhouses, so a street level shot needs a different block. The Vincent Thomas Bridge's towers also sit closer together than the Verrazzano's. Try searching hillside street with suspension bridge now.
Locust Point's brick rowhouses run in quiet blocks down toward the harbor, built by the same generation of immigrant dockworkers as Bay Ridge's own rowhouse streets. Hull Street and Reynolds Street keep that scale close to the water's edge. Locust Point has no bridge crossing in view, so a shot that needs open water with a crossing behind it would have to look elsewhere or crop the water out. Try searching brick rowhouses toward harbor now.
Bayonne, New Jersey
Bayonne sits on its own peninsula with streets running to the water and its own crossing to Staten Island, the Bayonne Bridge, a steel arch rather than a suspension span. Its Kill Van Kull frontage gives the same working harbor edge Bay Ridge has along the Narrows. Most of Bayonne's housing is wood frame rather than brick and limestone, so a close shot of a rowhouse front would give it away. The Bayonne Bridge's steel arch also reads differently from the Verrazzano's towers. Try searching peninsula streets to bridge now.
