Brick warehouses and rail sidings run down to the Bronx Kill, with Randalls Island and the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge across the water.
What Port Morris looks like
Port Morris sits on the tip of the South Bronx, where meets the Harlem and East Rivers. Willow, Locust and Walnut Avenues run through it, named for trees rather than numbers. Brick warehouses of one and two storeys line them, behind roll down gates and chain link fencing. A handful of factory buildings rise to six storeys, their windows set in wide brick bays.
Freight tracks follow the Bronx Kill toward the Oak Point rail yard, crossing empty lots and truck parking on the way to the water. Randalls Island sits directly across the channel, and the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge crosses it in the middle distance. At the foot of Locust Avenue, four rusted steel gantries rise over the riverbank. They date from 1948, built to lift ferries in and out of the water.
At and St. Ann's Avenue, the Bronx Grit Chamber is a wide brick and limestone building with round arched windows and a water tower on its roof. It still screens the city's sewage. Willow Avenue near 136th Street still holds the old factory, a plain brick front with Art Deco details worked into its entrance.
Bruckner Boulevard runs wide through the middle of the area, past auto shops and warehouse loading docks. Newer glass residential towers have gone up closer to the Harlem River, standing over the brick warehouses and rail lines around them.
Shot in Port Morris
Fort Apache, the Bronx shot its bar interiors at the Schlitz Inn, a single storey restaurant and bar on Willow Avenue. The exteriors for those same scenes were shot elsewhere in the Bronx, at a bar on Westchester Avenue.
Fort Apache, the Bronx, 1981
The production filmed its bar interiors inside the Schlitz Inn, a German restaurant and bar at the northwest corner of Willow Avenue and East 137th Street. A later restaurant in the same single storey building closed roughly a decade ago. It has stood vacant since. Street View
What Port Morris can double for
The Ironbound in Newark, New Jersey
Brick warehouses and small factory buildings still line streets like Union Street and Ferry Street, at the same one and two storey scale as Port Morris. Rail spurs cross several blocks on the way to the waterfront, echoing the sidings along the Bronx Kill. Newark's blocks carry more overhead wiring and denser modern signage, so a tighter frame or an early call time holds the period better than a wide street view. Try searching brick warehouses rail sidings now.
Historic East Side in Bridgeport, Connecticut
The Historic East Side kept its brick factory blocks and rail spurs along the harbor after the plants closed, at roughly the scale of Port Morris's own warehouses. Its streets run down to the water the same way Willow and Locust Avenues do. More of the East Side's factory windows are boarded or broken, so dressing in glazing and signage helps hold an active early industrial look. Try searching brick factory rail spur harbor now.
Waterfront South in Camden, New Jersey
Waterfront South keeps the same low brick industrial scale, with docks and rail access built for the same kind of shipping trade Port Morris once handled. Camden's surviving blocks are more scattered, broken up by demolished lots, so framing needs to avoid the gaps at the edges of a shot. Try searching low brick industrial dock blocks now.
