One main street runs the length of a small island of boat yards and seafood restaurants, reached by a single bridge.
What City Island looks like
runs the length of the island, and nearly every business sits on it. Seafood restaurants and antique shops fill the ground floors of two and three story buildings, most of them wood under painted clapboard, a few in brick. Neon and strings of lights hang over the sidewalk tables outside the restaurants.
Most of the side streets are short and end at the water. The houses along them are wood, with porches and small front yards behind picket fences. The at 30 Centre Street is clapboard Stick style built between 1887 and 1893, and a Sears catalogue bungalow on Pell Street dates from 1930. The 1897 school building on Fordham Street holds the , open on weekend afternoons.
Boat yards and yacht clubs sit along both shores, and sailboats are moored off the shoreline. The Hellgate Pilot House stands at the boat yard on . A pier runs out from the foot of Fordham Street, where a small ferry crosses to Hart Island.
at the southern tip is where the large seafood restaurants are, and the avenue ends at the water in front of them. One bridge is the only road on and off the island.
Shot in City Island
A Bronx Tale shot in the parking lot of Johnny's Reef at Belden Point and used the City Island Bridge at the far end of the island, a steel span that came down in 2017 when the causeway replaced it. The house at 21 played the Tenenbaum family's summer house in The Royal Tenenbaums, and the same house stood in for the Tyrone family's home in the 1962 film of Long Day's Journey into Night. Solitary Man and an episode of the series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee both shot at the .
City Island, 2009
Andy García and Julianna Margulies play a family living on the island, and the film keeps the real name for the place. It shot on location here and won the Audience Favorite Award at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.
What City Island can double for
Main Street in Greenport, Long Island, New York
Greenport's historic district is 254 contributing buildings from about 1750 to the 1930s, mostly wood frame, with a short Main Street commercial block running down to the harbor. The scale is close, a village of under a square mile on the water with shops and restaurants at ground level. The North Ferry to Shelter Island, the 1920s carousel and the railroad terminus all sit on Greenport's own waterfront, so a wide shot toward the water has nothing here to answer them. Try searching wood frame main street now.
New London, Connecticut
The exteriors for the 1962 film of Long Day's Journey into Night were shot here and set at the Tyrone family's summer house on the Connecticut shore in August 1912. The town behind the play is New London, where the O'Neill family's own Monte Cristo Cottage still stands. A 1912 frame has to keep parked cars and television aerials out of shot. The wood houses on the side streets hold that better than the shopfronts on the avenue. Try searching summer house on the shore now.
The Borough sits on a point of land projecting into Little Narragansett Bay, with two main streets through it and Connecticut's last commercial fishing fleet working out of the town dock. The shape is the same here, a narrow strip of land with water at the end of every side street. Stonington's buildings are colonial, Federal and Greek Revival, earlier than anything standing here. A residential street will not match, and the granite Customs House on Main Street and the stone harbor light have nothing here to answer them. Try searching fishing fleet dock now.
