The Williamsburg Bridge comes down at South 5th Street. Those blocks have stood in for the 1920s Lower East Side and for Queens.
What Williamsburg looks like
The crosses the East River into the middle of the neighborhood and comes down at . The blocks either side of that landing are the ones productions go back to.
The bridge opened in 1903 and families came across from the Lower East Side in numbers. By 1917 the neighborhood had the most densely populated blocks in the city. Satmar families arrived after the Second World War and settled south of Division Avenue, which is still the Hasidic part of Williamsburg. Shop signs on are in Yiddish.
Broadway runs under the bridge approach with the J, M and Z above it on steel. It was the banking street before any of that. The at 175 Broadway opened in 1875 under a steel dome. It has been an event space called Weylin since 2010. has been across the road at 178 Broadway since 1887.
The numbered streets cross Broadway and run on to Kent Avenue and the water. The is on Kent Avenue. Sugar was refined there until 2004 and the buildings are becoming offices and apartments.
North of the bridge, Bedford Avenue is the commercial street and the L stops there. is up at the Greenpoint line, with a 1936 pool and bathhouse behind an arch on Lorimer Street.
Film crews are in South Williamsburg often enough that the city stopped issuing permits for three months in 2009. The freeze ran from South 2nd Street to South 8th Street, between Kent and Bedford Avenues.
Films shot in Williamsburg
The blocks at the Brooklyn end of the bridge have played somewhere else three times.
Once Upon a Time in America, 1984
Sergio Leone wanted a few blocks of 1920s street with one of the big bridges behind them. He took South 8th Street at Bedford Avenue and had a whole block rebuilt for the prologue, where Noodles and Max meet as boys. The interiors were built at Cinecitta in Rome. The New York shoot ran into a dispute with IATSE over Leone's Italian crew that went as far as the Department of Labor.
Coming to America, 1988
Akeem asks the cab driver for the most common part of Queens and is put down at 392 , on the corner of Hooper Street, which is in Brooklyn. The My-T-Sharp barbershop was the ground floor and his room was above it. The building is still standing and is painted yellow now instead of red brick. Coming 2 America came back to the same corner in 2021.
John Wick, 2014
The room where Wick waits for Viggo and his men is the former at 175 Broadway, under the dome. In the film it is part of the church in Little Russia that hides the Tarasov vault. Another scene was shot a few blocks away on Wythe Avenue, beneath the bridge approach.
What Williamsburg can double for
Williamsburg can stand in for the 1920s Lower East Side, an ordinary Queens block and a Hasidic neighborhood.
