About 8,800 buildings here went up before 1900. Do the Right Thing and Crooklyn were each shot on a single 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 mapped in 1839, and most of the streets opened in the 1860s. Brownstone rows replaced the wooden houses that stood here first.
Those rows are thickest in . The National Register district there counts 577 buildings from about 1870 to 1900. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's own local district began in 1971 and more than doubled in 2013, adding about 825 buildings around it. and run through the older core, and the Commission drew a separate district around and Hart Street in 2024.
Bigger buildings line the avenues. The at Nostrand Avenue and Macon Street went up 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 1972.
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 once filming wrapped. The city renamed that stretch Do the Right Thing Way in 2015.
Crooklyn, 1994
Played the Carmichael family's block, 1973
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
Mount Morris Park in Harlem, New York
Mount Morris Park's rowhouses went up between the 1880s and 1900s in the same Romanesque Revival and neo-Grec styles that fill Stuyvesant Heights. The block scale matches too, brick and brownstone fronts running unbroken to the corner. Limestone appears on Mount Morris Park's later blocks the same way it does on Stuyvesant Heights' own turn of the century rows. Mount Morris Park's churches run larger and its topography is flatter than Bedford-Stuyvesant's, so keep a frame to the rowhouse block itself rather than widening to a corner with a steeple in it. Try searching Romanesque brownstone rowhouses now.
Bronzeville's rowhouses run in the same Romanesque Revival and Queen Anne styles as Bedford-Stuyvesant's, built between the 1880s and the 1920s in matching unbroken rows. The Black Metropolis-Bronzeville District spans dozens of blocks between the Dan Ryan Expressway and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, a scale close to Stuyvesant Heights itself. Bronzeville's fronts are Chicago greystone, a pale limestone facade rather than Bedford-Stuyvesant's brownstone and brick, so a tight frame on brick corners holds up better than a wide block shot. Try searching Romanesque greystone rowhouses now.
Marble Hill in Baltimore, Maryland
Upton's Marble Hill Historic District is brick rowhouses in Queen Anne and Italianate styles built in the early 1890s, close to Bedford-Stuyvesant's own peak building years. Corner towers, arched doorways and corbelled brickwork repeat down its seven blocks the way Stuyvesant Heights repeats its own cornice lines. Marble Hill's stoops are faced in marble rather than brownstone, so keep the steps out of a tight frame or the material gives the location away. Try searching brick Queen Anne rowhouses now.
