Sidney Lumet did not romanticize New York. He photographed it the way it actually looks at 7:30 in the morning when a precinct house lights flicker on, the way a Queens shopping plaza feels under sodium lamps, the way Park Avenue above 96th Street is a different city than the Park Avenue below it. For five decades he worked here, lived here, and left a body of films — 12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Prince of the City, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead — that doubles as a geographic record of late twentieth century New York. If you want to understand the city through a single director’s eye, Lumet is the most honest place to start. He never reached for myth. He just put the camera down and watched.
This guide is for the cinephile who wants to walk the streets Lumet shot, but the pilgrimage here is not about novelty addresses. It is about understanding why he chose them — why he insisted on shooting in all five boroughs when his peers built sound stages in Los Angeles, why he used Brooklyn brownstones when Hollywood would have given him Beverly Hills façades, why a former Movietone newsreel studio in Hell’s Kitchen was the right room to imprison twelve jurors for ninety-five minutes. Lumet treated New York as a working partner, not a backdrop. The pilgrim’s task is to walk the city the way he framed it.
The Lower East Side beginning
Sidney Arthur Lumet was born in Philadelphia on June 25, 1924, but the city that made him was the Lower East Side. His parents, Baruch and Eugenia Lumet, were Polish-Jewish émigrés and veterans of the Yiddish theater, and like thousands of other Yiddish-speaking families in the mid-1920s they settled in tenement housing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Lumet acted on the Yiddish stage as a child, on radio soap operas with his father, and absorbed — in his own retelling — the rhythms of working-class New York speech before he ever held a camera. When he later wrote in his memoir Making Movies that “the camera is the eye of the director,” he meant it in the most literal sense. The eye that recorded Sonny Wortzik shouting “Attica! Attica!” on Prospect Park West had first learned to see on Rivington and Hester.
There is no surviving Lumet plaque on the Lower East Side, no preserved tenement-as-museum. The pilgrim’s job here is gentler: walk Orchard Street and Grand Street on a weekday, look at the surviving pre-war fire escapes between the new glass condominiums, and understand that this was the visual texture of his childhood — the texture he would later replicate, decades later, when he had Al Pacino walk the same kind of street as a Brooklyn bank robber. The neighborhood has changed almost beyond recognition. Honor it by noticing what has not.
12 Angry Men (1957) — Foley Square and a Hell’s Kitchen sound stage
Lumet’s first feature was a courthouse drama whose courthouse barely appears. The exterior shots of jurors arriving and departing were filmed at the New York County Courthouse at 60 Centre Street, on the northeast corner of Pearl Street and Foley Square in Lower Manhattan — the hexagonal Corinthian colossus you have seen behind a hundred Law & Order establishing shots. Stand on the steps at the bottom of the staircase facing Foley Square. That is the angle Lumet used.
The famous jury room, however — the single sweating room where Henry Fonda turns eleven men around in real time — was not at 60 Centre Street. Lumet’s camera setups, which famously crept closer to the actors and lower toward the floor as the film progressed, demanded a controlled studio environment. The jury room was a set built at the former Fox Movietone Studio at 460 West 54th Street at 10th Avenue, in Hell’s Kitchen. The Movietone facility had earlier housed productions including Miracle on 34th Street and On the Waterfront, and Lumet would return to it for Fail-Safe and The Pawnbroker. The building itself is no longer a working soundstage, but the address is still there. The pilgrim’s gesture: walk from Foley Square to Hell’s Kitchen on an overcast day and let your feet feel the distance Lumet collapsed in editing.
The Pawnbroker (1964) — 1642 Park Avenue, East Harlem
Sol Nazerman’s pawnshop, the airless cage in which Rod Steiger remembers Auschwitz against his will, sat at 1642 Park Avenue near the intersection of Park Avenue and 116th Street in East Harlem — what was then called Spanish Harlem. Lumet shot the film mainly on location in the fall of 1963, with minimal sets, and the Park Avenue corner was the active center of the production. The New York Times reported onlookers gathering by the hundreds during shooting; the bustle of the neighborhood, which Lumet wanted on camera rather than dubbed in later, surrounded the crew.
The pawnshop is gone. The corner has changed, as East Harlem has changed. The pilgrim’s question, standing at Park and 116th, is the harder one: what does it mean to walk into a frame that is no longer a frame? The Pawnbroker was one of the films that broke the Hays Code on screen content. It used a real neighborhood and a real shopfront to confront American audiences with subject matter — Holocaust trauma, urban poverty — they had not been forced to confront before. The neighborhood was not a prop. It was a witness. Stand at the corner. Notice who walks by. That is the texture Lumet did not need to invent.
Serpico (1973) — 5-7 Minetta Street and the whole city
Serpico is the most New York film Lumet ever made because it could not have been made anywhere else. He shot at 104 separate locations across every borough except Staten Island — Harlem, the South Bronx, Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Astoria in Queens — and the geographic sprawl is itself the argument: corruption was not local, it was systemic, it lived everywhere. The film’s anchor address, Frank Serpico’s bohemian Greenwich Village apartment, was 5-7 Minetta Street, a curved single block tucked between Minetta Lane and Sixth Avenue. The real Frank Serpico lived a few blocks away at Perry and Greenwich, but the Minetta Street address was the one Lumet wanted on film. Walk down Minetta on a quiet morning and the curve of the block reveals itself the way a Lumet long-shot does: undramatic until you understand what you are looking at.
Other anchor points in the Village: Washington Square Park, where the film situates Serpico’s NYU Spanish classes on the east side of the park, and Caffe Reggio at 119 MacDougal Street, where he brings his girlfriend. The Village in 1973 was rougher than the Village now. The pilgrimage value here is in the contrast — the streets are the same shape, the storefronts are not. Caffe Reggio remains, and remains the kind of espresso bar that does not ask you to order a flight.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975) — Prospect Park West between 17th and 18th
The bank exterior — the most famous single block in Lumet’s filmography — is Prospect Park West between 17th and 18th Streets, just west of Prospect Park itself in Brooklyn. The bus line that ordinarily ran through the street was rerouted for filming; the second story of the building above the bank front housed production offices and catering. Stand on the block today and the geometry is intact: the curb where Pacino paced, the storefront window where Cazale stood guard, the angle from which the crowd faced him. The bank interior, the room where most of the film’s tension lives, was not actually a bank — Lumet’s crew found a warehouse on 10th Street in Flatbush, on the lower floor of a former automotive workshop, and built a bank set with movable walls so the camera could roam.
The pilgrim etiquette for the Prospect Park West block is the etiquette for any working New York street. The people who live above the storefront live there. They are not your B-roll. Stand on the opposite curb, take the picture you want, and move on. Then walk into Prospect Park itself — Lumet’s crew used the park edge as a natural extension of the shoot — and notice that the most famous urban-thriller location in 1970s American cinema is, two blocks east, an ordinary patch of trees and benches. That is the Lumet effect. The dramatic and the everyday are the same place. The camera decides which one you are looking at.
Network (1976) — 1350 Avenue of the Americas and the Apthorp
The fictional UBS network — the building from which Howard Beale tells America he is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore — is 1350 Avenue of the Americas at 55th Street, the former MGM Building. An empty floor was dressed as the UBS newsroom. The Apthorp Apartments on Broadway between 78th and 79th, the great limestone Italian Renaissance block on the Upper West Side, served as the residence for Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen. The Plaza Hotel ballroom hosted the UBS Affiliates Meeting scene. The interior newsroom and studio work, less famously, was shot at CFTO-TV in Toronto, but every defining New York frame in Network is a real New York address.
Walk 1350 Sixth Avenue. The MGM lion is long gone from the lobby but the building still stands where Beale’s prophet-broadcast was staged. Walk past the Apthorp on Broadway — it is private, the residents are private, but the façade is the façade. Network in 1976 was satire. Forty years later it reads as documentary. Lumet’s locations were chosen for credibility; the irony that credibility now serves the prophecy is one the city did not have to invent.
Prince of the City (1981) — all five boroughs
Lumet’s third NYPD-corruption film, after Serpico and before Q&A, was shot entirely on location in New York City between March and May 1980. With The Godfather, it remains one of the only major Hollywood productions to film in all five boroughs — Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. The film follows Detective Daniel Ciello, based on real Special Investigation Unit detective Robert Leuci, whose testimony helped indict 52 of his colleagues. Lumet’s geographic insistence — that the camera follow the case wherever the case actually went — is the film’s structural argument: corruption has a map, and the map is the whole city.
A full Prince of the City pilgrimage is a multi-day project that is best done by transit. The film deserves the discipline. Watch it first. Then ride the 4 train up to the South Bronx, the F to Coney Island, the Staten Island Ferry to St. George. Notice where Lumet placed the camera and notice that the placements are not picturesque. They are functional. He shot the city he had.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007) — Bayside, Astoria, a final note
Lumet’s last feature, made when he was 82, returned to the working-class outer boroughs that had defined his middle career. The botched-robbery jewelry store was filmed at the Bay Terrace Shopping Center in Bayside, Queens. Interior work was based at Hell Gate Studios in Astoria. The film is not set in Manhattan and could not be — its themes (family failure, suburban-edge dread) belong to the part of New York City that does not have a skyline. Bayside on a weekday afternoon is a long subway ride from Manhattan and a very different city. That difference is the film’s geography.
Where to see Lumet on the right screen
The honest answer is: keep checking the repertory calendars. Lumet is in heavy rotation at the city’s repertory houses because he is, in the strict and literal sense, the New York director — the one most likely to anchor a series, a retrospective, or a single anniversary screening. Watch the schedules at Film Forum (filmforum.org), Metrograph (metrograph.com), IFC Center (ifccenter.com), the Quad (quadcinema.com), and Film at Lincoln Center (filmlinc.org). Lincoln Center mounted a major retrospective, “Prince of the City: Remembering Sidney Lumet,” at the Walter Reade Theater shortly after his death in 2011, screening sixteen of his films — including the police-corruption trilogy of Serpico, Prince of the City, and Q&A — and the institutional memory at all five of these cinemas remains active. Dog Day Afternoon, Network, and Serpico in particular cycle through 35mm and DCP screenings several times a year.
Whenever possible, see them in 35mm. Lumet shot in 35mm. The grain, the color rendition, the specific way Brooklyn light bounces off a 1970s storefront window — that is information the film carries that a streaming compression cannot fully transmit. If you have to stream, do so. But if a 35mm Dog Day Afternoon appears on a Film Forum calendar, that is the screening to plan your week around.
A pilgrim’s day, sequenced
The most efficient single-day walking pilgrimage starts in Lower Manhattan and ends in Brooklyn. Begin at Foley Square: 60 Centre Street, the 12 Angry Men courthouse. Walk west to Greenwich Village and Minetta Street for Serpico. Stop at Caffe Reggio. Take the 1 train uptown, transfer to the 6, exit at 116th, and stand at Park Avenue and 116th — the Pawnbroker corner. From there, ride the 6 back down, transfer to the F at Broadway-Lafayette, and ride to 15th Street–Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Walk to Prospect Park West between 17th and 18th — the Dog Day Afternoon block. End the day at a Park Slope cinema or bar. Your feet will be tired. So were Lumet’s, every day, for fifty years.
Honoring the work
Lumet was awarded an Academy Honorary Award in 2005, “in recognition of his brilliant services to screenwriters, performers, and the art of the motion picture.” He did not win a competitive Oscar in his lifetime. Fourteen of his films received Academy Award nominations. He directed more than forty features over fifty-three years, working faster, leaner, and more often on location than nearly any of his contemporaries. He published Making Movies in 1995 — a book that remains the cleanest first-person account of how a director actually spends a working day, and which the Hollywood Reporter has named one of the hundred greatest film books ever written.
If you walk these blocks, walk them quietly. Do not stand in doorways. Do not photograph residents. The pilgrimage is not about proving you were there. It is about understanding that a director worth honoring chose this city, chose these specific streets, and asked his camera to do nothing more than report what was in front of it. New York returned the favor. The streets are still here. Watch the films first. Then walk.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is the Dog Day Afternoon bank?
The bank exterior in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is on Prospect Park West between 17th and 18th Streets in Brooklyn, just west of Prospect Park. The interior was a constructed set inside a warehouse on 10th Street in Flatbush.
Where did Serpico live in the film?
In the film, Frank Serpico’s Greenwich Village apartment is 5-7 Minetta Street. The real Frank Serpico lived a few blocks away near Perry and Greenwich Streets.
Was 12 Angry Men shot in a real courthouse?
Only the exterior. The exterior is the New York County Courthouse at 60 Centre Street on Foley Square. The jury room set was built at the former Fox Movietone Studio at 460 West 54th Street in Hell’s Kitchen.
Where can I see Sidney Lumet’s films on the big screen in NYC?
Check the calendars at Film Forum, Metrograph, IFC Center, the Quad Cinema, and Film at Lincoln Center. Lumet is a regular fixture of NYC repertory programming, and Dog Day Afternoon, Network, and Serpico in particular screen multiple times per year, often on 35mm.
What was Sidney Lumet’s last film?
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007), filmed largely in Bayside, Queens and at Hell Gate Studios in Astoria. Lumet was 82 when he made it.
46-Day Capture: This piece is part of HelpNewYork’s 46-Day Capture series tracking the city’s cultural geography. If you walked one of these Lumet locations and noticed something — a new business, a changed façade, a screening worth recommending — share it with us. The pilgrimage is collective.
