An elevated railway runs above Brighton Beach Avenue and the shops are underneath. The boardwalk is one block south.
What Brighton Beach looks like
The B and Q run above , and the shops are underneath. Shop signs put the Russian in large letters and the English small above it. Fruit is sold off tables outside the Tashkent Supermarket at number 713. The is above the avenue between Brighton 6th and Brighton 7th Streets, with the stairs down to the sidewalk.
Soviet Jewish families began arriving in the mid 1970s and the name Little Odessa dates from then. Thousands more came after 1991. Central Asians, mostly Uzbek, have been arriving since the 1990s. More than a third of residents do not speak or understand English. The at 1029 , the old Oceana, books touring Russian acts and plays them in Russian.
The big apartment houses went up before any of that, between the boardwalk and the avenue in the 1920s and 1930s. is a long run of them, six storey brick fronts with fire escapes.
Behind the avenue, bungalow colonies went up on the old race track. The walkways between them all got names. , Terrace and Lane run between Brighton 1st and Brighton 2nd Streets. The pattern repeats east to Coney Island Avenue. Most are too narrow for a car. The city does not light them, so some residents have wired up their own.
Every numbered street ends at the . The restaurants along it have glassed in terraces on the planks.
is at the east end, where Brighton 14th Street meets Corbin Place. It was dedicated in 1981.
Films shot in Brighton Beach
Both of these were shot in the neighborhood they are set in.
Anora, 2024
Toros takes the microphone in Tatiana on the boardwalk and asks the room whether anyone has seen Ivan. Only the owners knew a film was being made. The other diners were there for their own dinners and birthday parties, and by the third take one table was ready to fight the actors. The first take is the one in the film. Sean Baker had moved the production out to Brighton Beach two months earlier and was living on Brightwater Avenue, in the apartment that became Igor's.
Little Odessa, 1994
James Gray put the family in 601 , off Brighton 6th Street. He also used the Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe on Brighton 6th Street. The aquarium appears at night and so does the boardwalk. Most of the film happens in back hallways, storefronts and the yards behind the buildings rather than on the main streets.
What Brighton Beach can double for
Brighton Beach can stand in for a Russian speaking quarter of an American city, a seaside neighborhood out of season and an outer borough shopping street under an elevated line.
