The Pepsi-Cola sign stands in Gantry Plaza State Park. The Silvercup sign is still on the roof of the old bakery.
What Long Island City looks like
Long Island City is the western tip of Queens, across the East River from Midtown. The towers along the water are recent. A few streets inland the buildings drop back to two and three storeys of brick.
It was a city of its own from 1870 until 1898, when it joined New York. After that it was a factory district. Pepsi bottled on the waterfront and the Silvercup bakery ran on 21st Street. The city rezoned the area from industrial to residential in 2001, and 41 apartment buildings went up between 2010 and 2017.
Both plants left something behind. The went up on the bottling plant roof in 1940 and is 120 feet of red neon script. A nor'easter wrecked it in December 1992 and it was rebuilt. It reached its present place in in 2009 and became a city landmark in 2016. The two gantries the park is named for stand beside it. They were built in 1925 to load the rail car floats that carried freight wagons over to Manhattan.
The bakery closed in 1975 and reopened as in 1983. Its neon roof sign dates from about 1961 and is visible from the 7 train coming into .
Low blocks run west from . Nineteen townhouses from the late nineteenth century stand on between 21st and 23rd Streets. They were made a city landmark in 1968. One street south, the elevated 7 platform stands over 45th Road. is the old shopping street, still two or three storeys with storefronts at the bottom.
Films shot in Long Island City
Both of these used what was already standing.
The Warriors, 1979
45th Road looking west from the elevated station. Street View
The Warriors come up onto the street after a fire stops their train and the Orphans meet them there. In the film this is Tremont in the Bronx. The block is 45th Road, beside the elevated station. The card shop with the pitched roof that one of the Orphans watches from is 21-57 45th Road, a barber shop now. Mercy comes out of the doorway at 21-37. They leave heading west towards 21st Street.
Highlander, 1986
The last fight with the Kurgan was written for the Coney Island rollercoaster and moved to the roof under the Silvercup sign, at the Queens end of the Queensboro Bridge. The sign went up around 1961 over what was then the Silvercup bakery. The bakery closed in 1975 and the building has been since 1983. The sign that comes apart in the film was a third scale copy built and wrecked at a studio in London. The real one is still on the roof.
What Long Island City can double for
Long Island City can stand in for outer borough New York under the elevated, a factory district on the water and a new downtown of glass towers.
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