Most of the buildings stop at five or six storeys and the streets between them are narrow.
What Chinatown looks like
Most of the buildings between Canal and Worth Streets run five and six storeys, brick tenements with fire escapes bolted to the front and signs mounted vertically instead of flat against the wall. bends sharply halfway down its two hundred foot run, lined with barbershops and beauty salons on both sides of the turn.
runs one block from to the Bowery under a run of red and gold shop signs stacked above fire escapes three storeys high. At the corner of Mott and Mosco, the is grey Manhattan schist with brownstone trim and a copper octagonal bell tower above the roofline.
Buildings on the Bowery are taller and older. The , three storeys of brick with a peaked roof and dormer windows in the attic, sits at the corner of Pell Street and dates from the 1780s. Two blocks north, a domed limestone bank building from the 1920s now houses an art space, with a glass tower behind it. The Bowery ends to the south at , where eight streets converge around a small park and a memorial arch.
Fruit stands and steel scales crowd the sidewalk along Mott and Canal, crates of cherries and lychees stacked under the awnings. is the only open ground here, at the southern edge. A fenced playground faces Baxter Street, with apartment towers beyond it.
Shot in Chinatown
Ghostbusters used Mott Street for its ghost hunting montage in 1984, working fast with a small crew and no permits. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 shot outside the Nom Wah Tea Parlor on Doyers Street in 2013, where Peter and Gwen break up.
Ghostbusters, 1984
The run up Mott Street
Played itself, in the ghost hunting montage
The chase runs north up Mott Street through the crowd, past storefronts between numbers 56 and 64. A restaurant owner hands the team a pair of Peking ducks outside number 70. The production moved with a small crew and two trucks, working without permits at its stops that day.
What Chinatown can double for
Beach Street in Boston, Massachusetts
Beach Street, the spine of Boston's Chinatown, runs between three storey brick rowhouses built in the 1840s and 1850s. Corbelled cornices and stone lintels put them close to the scale of the smaller buildings among Mott and Pell, like the Edward Mooney House. Storefronts fill the ground floors on both streets, with apartment windows stacked above. Boston's more uniform Greek Revival trim and lower rooflines show up in a wide shot, so a tighter frame between two storefronts holds the comparison best. Try searching three storey brick rowhouses now.
Race Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Race Street runs through a similar mix to Mott and Pell, brick buildings with a storefront at street level and apartments in the floors above, some still showing painted signs and decorative awnings from the early 1900s. The block scale is close enough that a produce stand or a restaurant front could swap streets with no dressing. Race Street runs wider and straighter than Doyers or Pell, so a handheld frame that crops the roadway keeps the comparison honest. Try searching storefront at street level now.
Wentworth Avenue in Chicago, Illinois
Wentworth Avenue lines up the same run of ground floor restaurants and shops under close set upper floors, though its facades are painted with dragons and lettering that Manhattan's plainer brick does not show. The gate at Cermak Road and the pagoda topped mall nearby put a hard ceiling on how far the match can be pushed. Keep the gate and the mall out of frame and shoot the plainer storefronts mid block, where the painted facades thin out. Try searching ground floor restaurants and shops now.
