The Village as Film Set
Historic neighborhoods are great settings that make for striking film locations. Such is the case for our neighborhoods, which have long been the stage for television and movie productions. So much so, that several images of movie productions within our neighborhoods have made their way into our Historic Image Archive. In order to facilitate the browsing of the more than 4,500 images which make our image archive, we have added tags. These allow the user to filter through the images based on a variety of different subjects, including “Movie filming.”
Using the movie filming tag I was able to gather images of behind-the-scenes shots of several movies filmed in our neighborhoods. In some, the historic streets allowed for the transformation into a period-accurate setting for filming. This holds true for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 movie, “The Godfather Part II.” The movie features two storylines, one of which picks up at the end of the first Godfather movie, following the 1958 story of Michael Corleone. The other follows Michael’s Father, Vito Corleone from his childhood in Sicily to his arrival in New York City. To help tell the story of Vito’s arrival in New York City, parts of the East Village were dressed up as a 1917 version of Little Italy. The filming occurred in the early 1970s on East 6th Street between Avenues and A and B.
Similar dressing up occurred in 1980, in which parts of the East Village were altered to resemble the tun-of-the-20th century Lower East Side for the movie “Ragtime.” Features such as new signage, awnings and clothes lines were added to make the scene more accurate. Luckily, many of the surrounding buildings, which date to around when the movie was meant to take place, still feature many of their original architectural details, allowing for an easier and more historically accurate transformation.
Other notable shots uncovered using the new image tags include behind-the-scenes images of Martin Scorcese’s esteemed 1976 film, “Taxi Driver.” The filming of this movie did not require the same remodeling, as the gritty 1970s East Village offered the necessary backdrop to tell the story which centered around urban decay. While many exterior shots were filmed a tenement building at 226 East 13th Street, the two images in our archive were taken in a cafe at East 13th and 3rd Avenue, and feature Scorcese directing Jodie Foster and Robert De Niro.
Many more images of movie filming can be viewed in our historic image archive. To check out the image tagging yourself, click here to access the archive, select whichever tag(s) you are interested in, and then hit “apply.” You can view one tag at a time, or as many as you’d like. And whether you’ve accessed an image by this method or directly within a collection, all of the tags relevant to an image appear hyperlinked at the top of its page, so you can see how images are organized, and easily visit any of the tags. Have fun exploring Village Preservation’s Historic Image Archive!