Brick rowhouses on a flat grid to the Delaware waterfront, and the Ontario Street comic shop from Unbreakable and Glass.
What Port Richmond looks like
Port Richmond's residential streets sit on a flat grid, brick rowhouses set close behind narrow sidewalks laid in a crosshatch pattern. Most of the housing here went up before 1939, and rowhouses or other attached homes make up nearly three quarters of it.
Rowhouses on Chatham Street run twelve feet wide, two rooms up and two down over a dirt floor cellar. Those on Almond Street run wider, sixteen feet, with a paved cellar and three bedrooms upstairs. Where the fronts are brick, the mortar is a lime and sand mix rather than cement.
Allegheny Avenue crosses the neighborhood east to west, brick shopfronts under two and three storey flats. South of Allegheny, Richmond Street holds a run of Polish delis and grocers. The Route 15 trolley still runs in tracks set into the roadway between Allegheny and Westmoreland. , wider and built for cars, holds the neighborhood's newer commercial strip.
, in the Polish Cathedral style, stands at Allegheny and Thompson with twin spires over the rooflines around it. Interstate 95 runs on a raised deck along the river side of the neighborhood. It separates the rowhouse blocks from the container terminal and rail sidings on the Delaware.
Shot in Port Richmond
played itself twice. Samuel L. Jackson's Elijah Price knocks a rack of comics down inside the store in Unbreakable. The production returned nineteen years later for Glass, taking down the shop's own promotional signs and cleaning the inflatable Spider-Man seen in the first film to match it again.
Unbreakable and Glass
Ontario St. Comics, on Ontario Street near the river. Both films used the shop as itself, nineteen years apart.
Unbreakable, 2000
Ontario St. Comics
Elijah Price, working the counter from his wheelchair, knocks a rack of comics to the floor inside the store. The owner has kept the actual comic used in the scene on display since the film came out.
Glass, 2019
The production returned to the same store for reshoots, restoring its Unbreakable era look by taking down newer promotional material and cleaning the inflatable Spider-Man on display. The crew also pulled down a cardboard stand-up for a different comics franchise that had gone up in the shop since the first film.
What Port Richmond can double for
Greenpoint in Brooklyn, New York
Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint holds the same run of Polish delis and storefronts as Richmond Street, in brick buildings that back onto a working industrial waterfront on Newtown Creek. Both neighborhoods kept a Polish parish at their center next to riverfront industry. Greenpoint's blocks run taller in places, three and four storeys against Port Richmond's two. The Newtown Creek waterfront also reads more built up than the Delaware side here. Try searching Polish delis and storefronts now.
Canton's rowhouses run down toward a working industrial waterfront the same way Port Richmond's do. A Polish parish, St. Casimir's on O'Donnell Street, anchored the same kind of immigrant enclave. The scale of its two storey brick rows is close to Richmond Street's. Some Canton blocks carry formstone over the original brick, so a street with unclad brick fronts reads closer to Port Richmond. Try searching brick rowhouses working waterfront now.
Hamtramck in Detroit, Michigan
Hamtramck's worker housing, mostly built in the 1910s for a Polish immigrant workforce, gives its side streets a similarly close set scale to Port Richmond's rowhouse blocks. Both neighborhoods share the same period of Polish settlement and small brick construction. Hamtramck's houses are mostly duplexes set back with narrow side yards rather than Port Richmond's common wall rowhouses, so tight street level framing hides the difference better than a wide shot. Try searching Polish worker housing now.
