Main Street at Roosevelt Avenue is the third busiest crossing in New York. The signs above the shops are in Chinese and Korean.
What Flushing looks like
meets in the middle of downtown Flushing, and the crossing is the third busiest in New York after Times Square and Herald Square. The 7 train ends a few steps away. Buses from across Queens turn at the corner. The crowd waiting at the lights is deep at most hours.
The buildings behind the crowd are mostly two and three storeys, and their fronts are covered in signs. Chinese and Korean lettering runs down the brick vertically and sticks out over the sidewalk on brackets. Newer glass towers from the 2000s rise behind them. The Long Island Rail Road crosses Main Street on a bridge south of Roosevelt Avenue, and fruit sellers work the sidewalk underneath it.
runs southeast from Main Street. The shops along it are South Asian and halal rather than Chinese, with tall brick towers behind them.
The on was built in 1694 and still stands amid the newer development. The on Bowne Street dates from about 1661. , an eighteenth century house, stands behind the apartment blocks in Weeping Beech Park.
Shot in Flushing
Both of these were shot inside working Flushing businesses rather than on a set. The Wedding Banquet used a hotel banquet hall on 39th Avenue, and Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens used a restaurant on Main Street that is still serving today.
The Wedding Banquet, 1993
Played a New York banquet hall, 1993
Ang Lee's first feature to open in America was shot entirely on location in New York in five weeks, starting on 27 July 1992. The end credits list the Sheraton LaGuardia East on 39th Avenue among the locations, and the banquet the film is named after is held there. James Schamus, who wrote and produced it, said afterwards that free locations were what kept the production inside its budget.
Awkwafina Is Nora from Queens, 2020
Played Hunan Kitchen of Grand Sichuan, 2020
At the end of the fourth episode Nora spends her first paycheck on dinner with her grandmother at Hunan Kitchen of Grand Sichuan, on Main Street south of the railroad bridge. The restaurant is still at that address.
Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park is Brooklyn's own Chinese retail corridor. Canton House, a Cantonese seafood restaurant, opened on the avenue in 1985. Winley Supermarket followed on its corner in 1986, and the two gave the strip its nickname Little Hong Kong. The avenue runs low, two and three storeys of shopfronts under bilingual signs the same way Main Street does. The N train's Eighth Avenue station sits right on it the way the 7 sits on Flushing's Main Street. Sunset Park's blocks stay low with no towers rising behind them, so a wide shot with a glass tower in the background belongs to Flushing and not here. Try searching Chinese supermarket bilingual signs now.
Manhattan's Chinatown has stood in for itself and for a general Chinatown in a run of productions. The Godfather used 128 Mott Street as the front for the Corleones' olive oil company and the fruit stand across the street at 137 Mott Street for the shooting of Don Vito, and Ghostbusters shot its peking duck scene outside 68 Mott Street. Its narrow blocks carry the same stacked, bilingual shop signs Main Street does, though the buildings are older tenements rather than Flushing's mix of low shopfronts and new towers. Chinatown's four and five storey tenement walk-ups read older than Flushing's storefronts, so a frame that climbs above the second floor gives away which one it is. Try searching stacked bilingual shop signs now.
Golden Village is Richmond's own cluster of Asian shopping centres along No. 3 Road, Aberdeen Centre among them, which filmed scenes for Zoey's Extraordinary Christmas in 2021. Shop signs in the district are printed in Chinese, and the malls sit close enough together to form one dense commercial strip the way Main Street does. Golden Village's malls sit behind parking lots rather than a continuous sidewalk, so a frame has to stay close on a storefront or an interior court to avoid showing the gaps between buildings. Try searching Asian shopping centres now.
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