30 Minutes or Less|College Avenue and Wealthy Street — Chet's corner in Heritage Hill

Chet is the friend who stayed. He teaches, he lives in a first-floor apartment, and he is the last person who should be dragged into a bank robbery. The building the film gave him stands at the meeting of College Avenue and Wealthy Street, on the eastern shoulder of Heritage Hill.

This is the oldest residential district in Grand Rapids, sixty-odd blocks of brick-paved streets and houses built by nineteenth-century furniture money — Italianate, Queen Anne, Prairie, all of it lived in rather than roped off. Experience Grand Rapids notes that the red brick roads here also carried the pizza delivery scenes, and you can see why a location scout kept coming back: the pavement makes an engine sound different, and the porches give a camera something to move past.

Walk it from Wealthy Street north toward Fulton on a weekday evening. The traffic thins, the bricks change colour where they have been patched over a century, and the houses turn their lights on one at a time. Chet's block is not a landmark. It is a neighbourhood that happens to photograph like memory.

Location details per Experience Grand Rapids and the Michigan Film Office. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.