The rowhouse blocks run up the hill from a waterfront of concrete warehouses. Eighth Avenue is the first of Brooklyn's Chinatowns.
What Sunset Park looks like
The park sits on the hill between and Seventh Avenue, from 41st Street to 44th, with lower Manhattan and the harbor visible from the top of it. The city of Brooklyn bought the land in 1891.
The rows below went up between about 1892 and 1910, built for clerks and tradesmen rather than the wealthy. Most are two storeys over a basement and faced in brick, with brownstone and limestone on the better ones. The city made four historic districts out of these blocks in June 2019. The largest runs from 54th Street to 59th between Fourth Avenue and Fifth Avenue.
Parts of the neighborhood were called Finntown and Little Norway. Finnish families built two cooperative apartment houses on in 1916 and named them Alku and Alku Toinen. A block of was co-named Finlandia Street in 1991.
Chinese businesses started on in the 1980s and made it Brooklyn's first Chinatown. They run along the avenue from about 44th Street down to 68th.
was a shopping street until 1941, when an elevated parkway was built on the structure of the old Third Avenue el above it. The blocks below it are warehouse. runs from 32nd Street to 51st, built between 1902 and 1926. Cass Gilbert designed the further south, built in 1918 and 1919. Warehouse B there has an atrium with two disused railroad tracks through it and loading balconies staggered up the walls.
Shot in Sunset Park
Two films have used the abandoned lower level of the Ninth Avenue station, which has been out of service since the Culver Shuttle stopped running in May 1975. Joker also shot at the Brooklyn Army Terminal.
Crocodile Dundee, 1986
Played the Columbus Circle station, Manhattan, New York, 1986
Sue follows Mick into the subway at Columbus Circle and the film cuts to the lower level at Ninth Avenue, dressed as a packed rush hour platform. She gets a stranger to pass a message down the crowd, and Mick walks across the top of everybody to reach her. The 9 mosaics on the wall are what identify it.
Joker, 2019
Played a Gotham subway station, Gotham City, 2019
Arthur Fleck kills two brokers on a train and chases the third down to the lower level, shooting him on the stairs. It was staged on the Manhattan bound side, near the rear of the platform. The only view of it now is through the gate on the platform above.
Joker, 2019
Brooklyn Army Terminal
Played Arkham State Hospital, Gotham City, 2019
Arthur walks up to Arkham State Hospital, which is really the Brooklyn Army Terminal on 58th Street. The footbridge was given an engraved cap and the tower extra floors, both added digitally. Everything from the door inward was shot at a hospital in East Harlem.
Locust Point is a rail served waterfront terminal the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad built starting in 1845, with brick warehouses, covered piers and a rail yard packed onto a peninsula the same way Bush Terminal and the Brooklyn Army Terminal fill Sunset Park's own waterfront. Victorian brick rowhouses back straight up against the industrial blocks in both places. Locust Point's warehouses run lower and its piers are mostly gone, so frame Bush Terminal's loft buildings or Cass Gilbert's arcaded bridge instead, which carry more of the original industrial scale than what survives in Locust Point today. Try searching brick warehouses rail yard now.
Chinatown in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Philadelphia's Chinatown centers on the 900 block of Race Street, rowhouse storefronts with bilingual signage the same way Eighth Avenue holds Sunset Park's own Chinese businesses. Pagoda style roof details and Chinese characters worked into window ironwork appear on some of its side streets. Those pagoda roofed doorways and station signage in Chinese are specific to Philadelphia's Chinatown and don't exist on Eighth Avenue, so keep a frame to a plain storefront row rather than one with pagoda detailing in it. Try searching Chinatown rowhouse storefronts now.
