42|Cherry Street — Macon Repainted as 1947

The trick with a period street is that you cannot fake the buildings. You can hang new signs, park the right cars and clear the modern clutter, but the brick has to already be the right age. Cherry Street in downtown Macon is.

In spring 2012 the production took the blocks along Cherry and Second and pushed them back sixty-five years. Storefronts were repainted in flat 1940s colours. Early-model sedans lined the kerbs nose-in. Awnings went up, aerials came down, and Macon spent about two weeks standing in for the northern cities Robinson was moving through — the pavements outside hotels that would not take him, the streets where a Dodgers uniform did not buy safety.

That contrast is the quiet joke of the shoot. A Georgia city playing Brooklyn and Philadelphia in a film about a Georgia-born man, Jackie Robinson of Cairo, who had to leave the South to be told he could not stay in a northern hotel either.

The street is still worth the walk on its own terms. Cherry Street runs through the Macon Historic District, one of the largest concentrations of nineteenth and early twentieth-century architecture in the state, and the Terminal Station anchors its lower end. Bars and restaurants have taken over the ground floors. Look up above the awning line — that is where the film's version of the block still lives, in cornices and window bays nobody has modernised.

Start at Terminal Station and walk northwest. Three blocks is enough. The camera never needed more than that.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.