American Gangster|Claremont Theater Building — The Last Errand of Bumpy Johnson

The scene that sets everything moving is a quiet one: an old gangster losing his temper in an appliance store. Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson walks the aisles of a discount electronics barn, past a wall of televisions all tuned to the same picture, and rails at Frank Lucas about what has gone wrong with the world. Nobody owns anything anymore. No pride of ownership. Then his heart stops and he goes down between the display models, and Harlem's old order goes with him.

Ridley Scott shot that inside a building that had already lived three lives. On Broadway at West 135th Street, in Manhattanville, the Claremont Theater opened in 1914 — a 1,350-seat movie palace by Gaetano Ajello, dressed in Italian Renaissance terracotta, its entrance angled into the corner to catch the trade coming off the Broadway line. The pictures stopped in 1933. It became an automobile showroom, then offices, and eventually a self-storage depot, which is roughly what it remains. The production dressed the ground floor as a 1970s chain store and gave the building one more role.

New York designated it an individual landmark in 2006 — the same year the crew was working there. Stand on the corner today and the ornament is still legible above the modern storefront signage: the theatre's name in relief, the swagged panels, the arched upper windows that were built to be seen from a streetcar.

The doorway Bumpy walks through is a storage entrance. That is precisely the joke the scene is making about the death of the personal touch, and the building got there half a century first.

Photo: Pexels (free licence) — a Harlem streetscape, illustrative rather than the theatre itself.