The blocks are tenements of five and six storeys, and Delancey Street ends at the Williamsburg Bridge.
What Lower East Side looks like
Most of the neighborhood is tenements of five and six storeys, brick, with iron fire escapes down the front of nearly every one. The lots are narrow and the grid is tight, so a block is one long wall of brick with shopfronts cut into the bottom of it.
West of Essex Street those blocks are largely intact, synagogues still standing in among them. The sanctuary at 12 Eldridge Street keeps its 1887 painted arches and two levels of wooden balconies, with a rose window by Kiki Smith and Deborah Gans above the ark.
The south side of is the break in it. That stretch is dark glass and timber, and Delancey runs wide from there down to the Williamsburg Bridge.
South of Delancey and west of Allen Street the shopfronts carry Chinese signage most of the way to the water. and run that way from Chatham Square down, and the windows are papered with handwritten signs.
keeps a pair of low brick houses at 511 and 513, dormer windows in the slate roof. They stand a full two storeys under the tenements on either side.
Shot in Lower East Side
The Naked City ends with a chase through the Lower East Side and up onto the Williamsburg Bridge. Jules Dassin filmed nearly all of it on the real streets rather than a studio lot.
The Naked City, 1948
The chase up Delancey Street
Jules Dassin shot almost all of The Naked City on New York streets in 1947. One shot near the end looks east along the south side of Delancey Street with the bridge ahead of it, and another looks back west from the bridge itself. Those blocks were leveled in 1967, so the film keeps a stretch of the neighborhood that is no longer there. Street View
What Lower East Side can double for
Northern Liberties in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Northern Liberties has the same five and six storey brick tenement blocks with iron fire escapes on the front, on lots of a similar narrow width. Northern Liberties runs to a slightly wider street grid and less fire escape ironwork survives on the front. A tight frame on one tenement block, fire escapes included, holds the match better than a wide shot. Try searching brick tenement fire escapes now.
Pilsen is brick walkups over ground floor shopfronts on a tight grid, the closest Chicago equivalent to the Lower East Side tenement blocks. Pilsen brick runs redder, the cornices heavier, the lots wider than a Delancey Street block. Keep the frame close on one shopfront row rather than a full block. Try searching brick walkup shopfront now.
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