The Müuse Atlas / United States / New York / New York City

Filming in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn

About 8,800 buildings here went up before 1900. Do the Right Thing and Crooklyn were each shot on a single block.

The west side of Tompkins Avenue between Madison and Monroe Streets on a clear winter afternoon, a storefront church sign on the low brick building at the left and a taller house beside it with green painted bays and a heavy cornice, cars parked the length of the block.

What Bedford-Stuyvesant looks like

Bedford-Stuyvesant has about 8,800 buildings that went up before 1900. Most of them are rowhouses with the stoops and cornices still on them.

The street grid was drawn in 1835 and most of the streets opened in the 1860s. Trolleys and the elevated made it a commuter neighborhood for people working in downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan. The wooden houses that were here first came down and brownstone rows went up in their place.

Those rows are thickest in . The National Register district there counts 577 buildings put up between about 1870 and 1900, and the city tripled the size of its own district in 2013. and run through it. The Landmarks Preservation Commission drew a separate district around and Hart Street in 2024.

The bigger buildings went up on the avenues, among them the at Nostrand Avenue and Macon Street, built in 1889 to a design by Montrose Morris. It has six towers and open terracotta arcades, with shops along the ground floor.

is the shopping street and it runs the whole length of the neighborhood. There is no elevated over it. The line stopped in 1940, four years after the A and C opened underneath. sits on it, in the old Sheffield milk bottling plant the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation took over in 1967.

Films shot in Bedford-Stuyvesant

Do the Right Thing was shot in 1988 on the block of Stuyvesant Avenue between Lexington Avenue and Quincy Street. Sal's pizzeria was put up on the empty corner lot at Lexington and taken down again afterwards, and the city renamed that stretch Do the Right Thing Way in 2015.

Crooklyn, 1994

The Church of the Pilgrim Holiness at 24 Arlington Place, a two storey brick front with a painted sign across it and an iron fence along the sidewalk, the ARLINGTON PL street sign on the pole in front.

Crooklyn was shot almost entirely on Arlington Place over the summer of 1993. The street is one block long, from Halsey Street to Macon Street. The Carmichael house is number 7, and most of the film happens on its stoop and in the road outside. The block looks north toward the Halsey Street brownstones.

What Bedford-Stuyvesant can double for

Bedford-Stuyvesant can stand in for Brooklyn in the 1970s, Harlem and a nineteenth century brownstone street.

Areas like Bedford-Stuyvesant

Crown HeightsClinton HillHarlem

Look

Rowhouse and terrace streets

“a block of brownstone rowhouses with high stoops and cast iron railings”

Run this search with Melp