All About Eve | Paley Park, New York — Where the Stork Club Used to Be

The American Film Institute's catalogue records that the company shot at the Stork Club in New York before principal photography began, and Fox then rebuilt the club's rooms on a sound stage in Los Angeles and dropped the real footage in behind the actors. That was standard practice in 1950, and it is why the film's most exclusive room is both authentic and entirely fake.

The Stork Club stood at 3 East 53rd Street. Sherman Billingsley, an Oklahoma bootlegger with a felony conviction, ran it as the hardest door in Manhattan: a gold chain across the entrance, a Cub Room he personally policed, and a guest list that decided who counted in New York that season. Billingsley closed it in October 1965 after a bruising union fight, and the building came down the following year.

What stands there now is the opposite of everything Billingsley built. Paley Park opened in May 1967, funded by William S. Paley in memory of his father and designed by Zion & Breen — a fifth of an acre, honey locust trees, movable chairs, and a wall of water twenty feet high that drowns the traffic on Fifth Avenue.

Take a chair near the back. The waterfall is loud enough that you cannot hear the street, which is the only kind of exclusivity this address offers now, and it is free.

Location: 3 East 53rd Street, Manhattan. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.