The Amazing Spider-Man|Williamsburg Bridge — the span where the mask comes off

The Lizard tears through stopped traffic here, cars go over the rail, and Spider-Man climbs down through the girders to pull a boy out of one of them — pushing his mask into the kid's hands so he has something to be brave behind. It is the emotional hinge of the film, and the production shot it on the real East River crossing rather than inventing one.

The Williamsburg Bridge earns that. It opened in 1903, the first big suspension bridge built of steel towers instead of masonry, and it looks it: no Gothic arches, no romance, just a lattice of riveted iron the colour of dried blood, 7,308 feet from Delancey Street to Broadway in Brooklyn. Subway trains run through the middle of it and you feel them in the deck. It has always been the workhorse of the three downtown bridges, the one nobody photographs for postcards, which is exactly why a scene about ordinary people in stalled cars belongs on it.

You can walk it. The pedestrian path starts near Delancey and Clinton on the Manhattan side and runs the full length, caged in steel, loud, unglamorous, with the Manhattan Bridge and the whole skyline opening up to the south.

Stop at mid-span, put a hand on the truss, and wait for a J train. The shudder that comes up through your feet is the thing no set could have given the sequence.

Location confirmed by movie-locations.com and The Cinemaholic.