2 Guns|Audubon Park, New Orleans — live oaks outside a DEA man's front door

Between St. Charles Avenue and Magazine Street the city stops pretending to be flat concrete and turns into three hundred and fifty acres of live oak. Audubon Park was laid out on the ground that held the 1884 World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition, and the Olmsted firm gave it the shape it still has: a lagoon that bends out of sight, a loop path under trees old enough to have their limbs propped, and a lawn that swallows sound.

For 2 Guns, this neighbourhood supplied a home. Bobby Trench's DEA supervisor, Jessup, lives here in the film — the kind of address that tells you immediately which side of the money he is on, without a line of dialogue doing the work. The houses around the park are private and stay private; the production borrowed the setting, not a landmark.

So the pilgrimage here is the park itself, and it holds up. Come in from Magazine Street in the early evening, when the joggers thin out and the light comes sideways through the oaks. Herons work the lagoon edges. The streetcar rattles along St. Charles on the far side. Nothing about it looks like a crime film, which is precisely why a crime film wanted it: the calm is the point, and the calm is what turns out to be bought.

Walk the loop once, slowly. Then look at the houses over the fence line and see them the way the camera did — as evidence. (Locations per the film's official production notes. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons.)