The Amazing Spider-Man 2|Marcy Avenue Armory — where Oscorp's lobby was built from scratch

The lobby that swallows Max Dillon was a carpentry job in Williamsburg. Production took the drill shed of the Marcy Avenue Armory, at 355 Marcy Avenue where it meets Lynch Street, and built three storeys of Oscorp inside it — glass, signage, mezzanines, the whole corporate atrium — because no working Manhattan office tower will surrender its ground floor for weeks of night shoots.

The building was made for exactly this kind of volume, just not this kind of use. It went up in the 1880s for the 47th Regiment of the New York National Guard: red brick, corner towers, arched windows set deep in the wall, a facade that borrows from a medieval fortress and entirely means it. Behind the head house sits the drill shed, a clear-span hall built to march a regiment indoors. Film crews have used New York's armories for a century for the same reason the regiments did — nothing else in a dense city gives you that much column-free room under one roof.

It is still an active National Guard armory, and it has served the city as a shelter, so the drill shed is not somewhere a visitor can wander in. That is the honest limit of this stop, and it is worth stating plainly rather than sending anyone to a locked door. The pilgrimage here is the outside.

Come up from the Marcy Avenue J/M/Z station and walk the Marcy Avenue frontage slowly. The brick is darker than photographs suggest, and the scale only registers once you are standing beneath it. Then picture that hall behind the wall lit like a Fifth Avenue lobby at three in the morning, with a man in a jumpsuit carrying blueprints nobody wants.

Photograph by Matt Green, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, via Flickr.