American Gangster|Mt. Olivet Baptist Church — The Wedding and the Arrest on the Steps

Frank Lucas is never more respectable than he is on these steps. Dark suit, wife on his arm, mother beside him, the congregation spilling out into Sunday light on Lenox Avenue. Then Richie Roberts comes up the sidewalk with a warrant and the whole performance ends in the street, in front of everybody Frank spent a decade trying to impress. The production shot both the wedding and that arrest here, at 201 Malcolm X Boulevard, at West 120th Street.

The building was not made for a Baptist congregation. It went up in 1907 as Temple Israel, a synagogue for Harlem's then-substantial German Jewish community, and it was built to look permanent: a heavy classical portico, giant columns, and a broad flight of steps that lifts off the avenue like a stage. When that community moved on in the 1920s, Mt. Olivet Baptist Church bought it in 1925 and has held it ever since.

The synagogue's bones are still there, inside and out. That is why the steps photograph the way they do, and it is almost certainly why the location department wanted them: a congregation formed in the Great Migration inherited a temple, made it Harlem's, and eighty years later a film crew used the same stone to stage the collapse of a Harlem empire.

Go on a Sunday morning and the scene assembles itself without any help from anyone. The doors open, the choir carries out to the sidewalk, and people come down those steps in their best clothes exactly as they do in the film — minus the detectives.

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