Wholesale produce, meat and fish markets run through the night on a peninsula between two rivers.
What Hunts Point looks like
The peninsula is cut off from the rest of the South Bronx by the Bruckner Expressway, with the Bronx River on one side and the East River on the other. Hunts Point Avenue runs the length of it, from Southern Boulevard down to East Bay Avenue. The old railroad station at has storefronts along its ground floor. Dozens of auto glass and auto parts shops sit around that corner and along , low buildings with hand painted signs and a wrecking yard among them.
The covers 113 acres at the southern end. Its four buildings run parallel, each two storeys and a third of a mile long, with offices above a loading platform about twenty feet wide and refrigerated trailers backed onto it. Chain link fencing runs along Halleck Street and a freight branch curves in from Whitlock Avenue past red silos. The and the meat market stand beside it and the platforms are busiest in the middle of the night.
The fills a block at Lafayette Avenue and Tiffany Street, arched windows down the whole wall under a corner tower. Corpus Christi Monastery faces it across Lafayette behind a thick wall on three sides. stands east of there at Faile Street, gray stone under a red roof with two brick chimneys. It is Bright Temple A.M.E. Church now.
North of Lafayette Avenue the blocks turn residential, and the attached houses on Gilbert Place and Irvine Street have bowed front rooms. is twelve acres of East River waterfront at Viele Avenue and Tiffany Street. A swimming pool built into a barge is moored off it in summer, next to a small beach and a fishing pier.
Shot in Hunts Point
Both credits here are documentaries. One was shot on the streets and the other inside the fish market.
Hookers at the Point, 1996
The neighborhood's own streets
Brent Owens directed this HBO documentary about street prostitution, shot on the peninsula's own streets. The production does not name a particular block. The streets are industrial, low buildings with auto shops and wrecking yards behind chain link.
Bx46, 2014
The Fulton Fish Market
Jeremie Brugidou and Fabien Clouette filmed Bx46 inside the Fulton Fish Market over about ten visits across six months. It also films the waste transfer plant next door and the Vernon C. Bain Center, the jail barge that was moored offshore until it was towed away for scrap in November 2025.
What Hunts Point can double for
Packer Avenue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia's produce terminal traded from two long buildings facing each other over covered loading docks until 2011, when the whole trade moved into one enclosed refrigerated shed on Essington Avenue. The four rows here still work the older way, with offices above the platform and refrigerated trailers backed onto it through the night. Manhattan sits across the water in any wide shot from the river end, so keep the camera down between the rows. Try searching covered produce loading dock now.
The terminal on Smallman Street runs 1,533 feet along the old Pennsylvania Railroad yard, a quarter of a mile of brick and steel bays built for unloading freight cars. Wholesale produce left it in the 2000s and the building is a food hall and offices now, while the rows here still take rail off a branch from Whitlock Avenue. Smallman Street is public and its terminal is brick, so a shot that needs a facade and a sidewalk has to be found somewhere other than inside this fence. Try searching brick freight terminal bays now.
University Village in Chicago, Illinois
Chicago sold its wholesale produce off raised loading platforms under broad canopies on the South Water Market's terracotta rows between Racine Avenue and Morgan Street, and that trade ended in the early 2000s. The platform here is worked the same way, about twenty feet wide with buyers and forklifts on it at once. The Chicago rows stand on an open city street and hold condominium lofts now, so a wide shot with traffic behind the buyers is not available here. Try searching raised loading platform now.
