The Amazing Spider-Man 2|Doyers Street — the two-in-the-morning bend in Chinatown

You cannot fake a bend like this. Doyers Street runs about two hundred feet from Pell Street down to Chatham Square and turns close to ninety degrees in the middle for no reason a street grid can explain — it follows the edge of a Dutch farmer's holding and a stream that has been buried for two centuries. Sony's crew closed it in the small hours and ran the plutonium truck through the crook.

One of the film's producers put the reasoning plainly: there is something about standing in the middle of Chinatown at two in the morning that you simply cannot reproduce or fake. The film proves the point by contrast. Times Square defeated the production — four hours of real filming was all the city would give — so four blocks of it were rebuilt on a backlot out in Bethpage. Doyers they just used, as it is, at night, with the shopfront neon doing the lighting.

The bend has an older reputation. Newspapers of the 1900s called it the Bloody Angle and claimed the blind corner made a perfect ambush during the Tong wars, a story historians now think was largely sold to tourists. What is beyond argument is Nom Wah Tea Parlor at number 13, open since 1920, the oldest dim sum parlour in the city, tin ceiling and red vinyl booths intact, with a queue down the pavement most weekends.

Walk it from the Pell Street end after dark. Halfway along, the street vanishes and you are looking straight at a brick wall with signage glowing on it. That dead end is the frame the whole sequence was cut for.

Photograph by Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.