A discount store strip runs along Jamaica Avenue, with an AirTrain guideway over the transit hub and a colonnaded 1930s courthouse a few blocks off it.
What Jamaica looks like
Discount stores fill the storefronts along Jamaica Avenue, compared often to Brooklyn's Fulton Street for how cheap and crowded it gets. Hair salons and 99 cent stores fill many of the ground floor spaces.
No elevated train runs above the shopping stretch of Jamaica Avenue today. The neighborhood's own elevated structure is , an automated guideway that meets the Long Island Rail Road at Sutphin Boulevard and Archer Avenue, next to the JFK Airport stop. The , built in the 1930s, stands a block from that hub. It is seven stories of white Alabama limestone with a row of Corinthian columns across its front.
East along Jamaica Avenue, surrounds King Manor, a wood frame farmhouse dating from the 1730s to the early 1800s. The former First Reformed Dutch Church stands directly across the avenue from the house, now used as the . Farther east, near 164th Street, the Jamaica Main post office is brick with a granite base and marble trim. Its portico is lined with four Ionic columns.
Shot in Jamaica
The Queens County Courthouse doubled for the Bronx County Courthouse in The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1990. The film's exterior shots use the real Bronx courthouse, but its interior court scenes were shot at night inside this one.
The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1990
The courthouse interior
Played the Bronx County Courthouse, The Bronx, New York City, 1990
The 1990 film The Bonfire of the Vanities shot its courthouse interior scenes here at night. The film's courthouse exteriors were filmed instead at the Bronx County Courthouse.
What Jamaica can double for
Fulton Street in Downtown Brooklyn, New York
Fulton Street runs the same crowded discount clothing and electronics trade as Jamaica Avenue. It was closed to cars in 1969 and became a pedestrian mall, similar to the restriction Jamaica Avenue itself tried briefly with a 2021 busway pilot. Downtown Brooklyn's office towers now rise behind Fulton Street, so a tight frame on the storefronts holds the match better than a wide shot that catches the skyline. Try searching crowded discount storefronts now.
Discount stores ring the transit hub at Journal Square the way they do at Sutphin Boulevard, with buses and PATH trains converging on the plaza. The six story Hudson County Courthouse, a Beaux-Arts building from 1906 to 1910, stands a few blocks off the square much as the Queens County Courthouse sits off Jamaica's own hub. Journal Square's PATH platforms sit in an open cut under a 1926 arch bridge rather than on an elevated guideway, so a shot including the tracks would need to avoid implying AirTrain's overhead structure. Try searching discount stores and a courthouse now.
Broad Street in Newark, New Jersey
Discount clothing stores and beauty supply shops fill many of Broad Street's storefronts, the same kind of retail that fills the storefronts through downtown Jamaica. The restored Hahne and Company building near Military Park gives one stretch of Broad Street a cleaner, more upscale front than Jamaica Avenue has, so framing should stay south of it. Try searching discount clothing storefronts now.
