The Müuse Atlas / United States / New York / New York City

Filming on the Upper West Side, Manhattan

Central Park West is mostly apartment houses from around 1930, and several of them have two towers on top.

Central Park West looking north from about 75th Street, with the tower of the Fourth Universalist Society church on the left, a columned stone building beyond it and an apartment house with corner towers further up the avenue.

What the Upper West Side looks like

Central Park West is a run of prewar apartment houses. Most went up between the 1900s and the 1930s, and a few end in twin corner towers with copper lanterns on top. , between 74th and 75th Streets, is twenty-seven floors with two towers rising off a seventeen-story base. , at 72nd Street, is shorter and older. It is gabled and turreted in buff brick, with a corner tower and a carriage arch at street level.

The side streets behind the avenue are four and five story brownstones with stoops. Some are painted over, with iron gates at the sidewalk. Small businesses fit into the English basements below the stoops. and Amsterdam Avenue run between the blocks, with restaurants under awnings and tables set out at the curb.

Broadway comes in on a diagonal from Columbus Circle and crosses the other avenues before running parallel to them above 78th Street. sits at the Amsterdam Avenue crossing at 72nd Street, with a subway entrance built into the middle of the plaza. fills the whole block between Broadway and Amsterdam from 86th to 87th Street, a limestone and brick front around a central courtyard.

West End Avenue and Riverside Drive are quieter and almost entirely residential, with fewer storefronts than Broadway or Columbus. Riverside Park runs below the Drive down to the Hudson. The stands over the park at 89th Street, a ring of Corinthian columns on a granite base.

Shot on the Upper West Side

West Side Story shot its street scenes on West 68th Street between West End and Amsterdam Avenues, on blocks that came down for and Lincoln Towers in the 1960s. None of that block survives to be scouted today. Two later productions used real buildings that are still standing on Central Park West.

Rosemary's Baby, 1968

The Dakota

Played the Bramford, 1968

The Dakota plays the Bramford, and only from the outside. Principal photography started in New York on August 21, 1967. By September the shoot had moved to Paramount in Hollywood, where the Bramford's apartments had been built on sound stages. The building itself is at 1 West 72nd Street and was finished in 1884.

Ghostbusters, 1984

Played the Shandor Building, 1984

55 Central Park West looking north across West 65th Street, the brick going from dark at the bottom to pale at the top, with Holy Trinity Lutheran Church beside it.

Dana Barrett's building is 55 Central Park West, on the corner of 65th Street with Holy Trinity Lutheran Church beside it. It has nineteen floors and was finished in 1929 to a design by Schwartz and Gross. The production designer John DeCuir added eight more floors and a rooftop temple to the exterior shots with matte painting. On screen the address is 550 Central Park West.

What the Upper West Side can double for

Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, New York

Eastern Parkway has the same run of prewar apartment houses as Central Park West, wide enough that buildings like Turner Towers and Copley Plaza are compared directly to Park Avenue developments in Manhattan. The service roads and medians give the avenue an even wider, more formal cross section than Central Park West. Frame tight on one building front to avoid the service road and median strip, which look suburban rather than Manhattan in a wide shot. Try searching prewar apartment houses now.

Grand Concourse in the Bronx, New York

The Grand Concourse is a wide boulevard of five and six story apartment houses, built in the 1920s and 1930s, many with entrance courtyards and Art Deco trim. The avenue is the same scale of grand residential boulevard as Central Park West, just in a later architectural style. The Concourse runs 180 feet across with planted median strips the Upper West Side does not have, so keep the road width out of frame. Try searching Art Deco apartment houses now.

Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York

Park Slope's side streets are four and five story brownstone rowhouses with stoops, built mostly in the 1880s and 1890s, which is close to the stoop line behind Central Park West. The buildings themselves are lower and narrower than an Upper West Side apartment house. Stay on one rowhouse block rather than pulling back to an avenue, since Park Slope has nothing the scale of the Belnord or the San Remo. Try searching brownstone rowhouses with stoops now.