Detached wood frame houses on streets that end at a beach, and the shore park where Margot at the Wedding filmed.
What Tottenville looks like
Streets of detached wood frame houses end at the water on three sides. The Arthur Kill runs along the west and north of the neighborhood, with the Outerbridge Crossing and the Perth Amboy waterfront across the channel. Bentley Street dead ends at a stony beach, a row of old pilings standing in the water off the end of it. A small marina sits on the same shore to the south, its boats moored off timber docks.
The Victorian houses are on Amboy Road and Bentley Street. is painted green and orange, with gingerbread trim and a porch around two sides. The Bedell House at has a mansard roof, dormer windows and a polygonal bay across two floors. St. Paul's United Methodist Church stands in red brick at Swinnerton Street and Amboy Road, its windows round arched. Away from those the blocks are plainer, with porches and small front yards.
Park is the southern end of the neighborhood, more than 286 acres of woods and shore. Gravel paths run through the trees down to Ward's Point. The stone Conference House dates from before 1680 and stands at the top of a lawn running down to the shore. The sits farther north, built between 1845 and 1853. The beach below the clay bluffs runs two and a half miles, and horseshoe crabs come ashore along it every May and June.
is the last stop on the Staten Island Railway, on Bentley Street at Arthur Kill Road. The next stop up the line, Arthur Kill, has canopied waiting areas behind translucent windscreens. A covered overpass between the platforms is glazed with panels of the local landscape and wildlife.
Shot in Tottenville
Noah Baumbach shot Margot at the Wedding at Conference House Park in 2006 with Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. The same production shot on Shelter Island, in Hampton Bays and on City Island in the Bronx.
Margot at the Wedding, 2007
Played Long Island, New York
The film is set at one house on Long Island. The park runs to more than 286 acres, and about twenty of them are a designated archaeological site.
What Tottenville can double for
Shelter Island, New York
Margot at the Wedding shot this shore and Shelter Island for one story set at a single house on Long Island. The park has two and a half miles of beach below clay bluffs, with a wooded lot behind it deep enough to set a house in the trees. The Outerbridge Crossing and the Perth Amboy waterfront sit across the water on the north and west sides, so a clear horizon means pointing the camera south or east. Try searching house on a wooded lot now.
Morris Street in Oxford, Maryland
Oxford sits on a hook of land in the Tred Avon with water on three sides, and almost all of it is late nineteenth century frame houses with porches. A Second Empire mansard stands at the corner of Morris Street and the Strand, the same roof the Bedell House has on Amboy Road. The Staten Island Railway runs beside Arthur Kill Road with current stock and modern platform shelters, so a period frame has to stay clear of it. Try searching frame house with a porch now.
Tazewell Avenue in Cape Charles, Virginia
Cape Charles is a twenty seven block grid laid out at the southern end of a railway line beside a harbor, with small workers houses of the 1880s among later commercial and municipal buildings. Little of it has been rebuilt, and quiet streets of detached houses running down to the water are what match here. A central park with four landscaped streets off it has no counterpart here, so the comparison holds on the residential blocks rather than on the town plan. Try searching small workers houses now.
