The Adjustment Bureau | New York Public Library — head office of the men in hats

Of all the buildings in New York the film could have chosen for the Bureau's headquarters, it picked the one where strangers already sit in silence under high ceilings, moving paper. Harry Mitchell broods here between assignments, and the joke lands because the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building genuinely feels like an institution that has been quietly filing the fate of the city since 1911.

Everything the camera wants is free to walk into. Astor Hall's white marble swallows sound. The staircases have the worn edges of a century of footsteps. Up on the third floor the Rose Main Reading Room runs the length of a city block under a painted sky, its lamps in rows like a runway — and it was rebuilt and reopened in 2016 after a ceiling rosette fell, so what you see is a restoration of the room the crew shot around.

Come on a weekday morning before the tour groups. Take a seat at one of the long oak tables, look up, and count how many people in the room are working on something nobody else knows about yet.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.