There is a particular quality of light in New York City on a late afternoon in autumn — the low sun catching the limestone facades of Central Park West, the park itself going amber behind the stone wall, the doormen of the great prewar buildings standing like sentinels between the street and a world that seems to exist entirely apart from the rest of the city. Woody Allen has spent a career trying to put that light on film, and whatever complications have accrued around his name and legacy, the images remain. The Upper West Side he constructed across five decades of filmmaking is a place that exists partly in geography and partly in longing — a New York that was always already being mourned even as it was being made.
This is a guide for the cinephile pilgrim who wants to walk it: not to gawk, not to take a selfie where a movie star stood, but to understand a city through the eyes of someone who looked at it more obsessively, more lyrically, and more problematically than almost anyone else who has ever pointed a camera at it.
The Filmmaker and the Neighborhood
Allen was born Allen Stewart Konigsberg in Brooklyn in 1935, but the Upper West Side became his spiritual and eventually his literal home. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the neighborhood was undergoing its own complicated transformation — the gentrification that followed the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, the displacement of working-class and minority residents, the arrival of professionals and artists who saw in the UWS a kind of European bohemia made American. Allen’s films rarely acknowledge this transformation directly. His Upper West Side is a sealed world of intellectuals, therapists, writers, and musicians — Jewish, educated, neurotic, self-aware to the point of paralysis. It is, in other words, a selective vision, and part of walking these streets as a pilgrim is holding that selectivity in mind alongside the beauty of what the camera actually caught.
His most important Upper West Side films are Manhattan (1979), Annie Hall (1977), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). Each one deposits a layer of celluloid memory onto specific streets and buildings. Walk them in order and you’re walking through a career as much as a neighborhood.
Starting Point: Zabar’s, 2245 Broadway
Begin at Zabar’s, at 2245 Broadway on the corner of West 80th Street. It opened in 1934 when Louis and Lillian Zabar rented a counter in a Daitch Market — smoked fish, appetizing goods, the tastes of the Lower East Side transplanted uptown. Today it occupies a two-story, 20,000-square-foot space that functions as deli, café, and gourmet grocery, a 90-year-old institution that has outlasted nearly everything around it.
In Manhattan, Isaac Davis (Allen) and Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton) stop to look in a shop window near Zabar’s — a small, throwaway scene that is in fact the neighborhood being used as character. This is what Allen understood: that on the Upper West Side, the stores were not backdrop. They were autobiography. For the characters he wrote and played, being someone who went to Zabar’s was a statement about who you were and who you wanted to be.
The pilgrim move here is not to buy something — though the sturgeon is worth it — but to stand on the corner of 80th and Broadway and look at what remains. Broadway here is wide and tree-lined, the traffic island with its benches still functioning as an unofficial gathering place. Some of the buildings on the side streets are the same ones Allen’s camera moved past. The neighborhood has gentrified further since his peak years, but Zabar’s itself has a stubborn continuity that makes it the most reliable anchor point for any Allen walking tour.
Central Park West: The Great Apartment Corridor
Walk east on 80th Street toward Central Park West. This is the spine of Allen’s UWS — the row of prewar limestone apartment buildings that face the park and function in his films as shorthand for a certain kind of achieved New York life. The Langham, at 135 Central Park West between 73rd and 74th Streets, is the most significant stop.
In Hannah and Her Sisters, the Langham is Hannah’s apartment building — the grand, slightly worn-in setting for the Thanksgiving dinners that structure the film. What makes this location unusual in the Allen canon is that it was genuinely Mia Farrow’s home: she lived in the building at the time, and the apartment used for filming was her actual apartment. Allen shot inside a real life, which makes the film’s later associations — the collapse of his relationship with Farrow, the allegations that followed — feel uncomfortably embedded in the architecture. You cannot stand in front of the Langham without that history being present.
The building itself is a 1907 structure, its limestone facade now dark with age, its entrance quietly dignified in the way of buildings that don’t need to announce themselves. The Langham is a private residential building; there is no public access, and the pilgrim’s engagement is exterior only — looking up at the windows, thinking about what it means that one of the most warmly lit, most romantically humanist films in American cinema was shot here, and that its director and its star would within a few years become the subject of allegations that permanently reshaped the cultural conversation around both of them.
The Hayden Planetarium Scene: Central Park West at 81st
Continue north on Central Park West to 81st Street and the American Museum of Natural History. The Hayden Planetarium — originally opened in 1935, demolished and rebuilt as the Rose Center for Earth and Space, which opened in 2000 — appears in Manhattan in one of the film’s most celebrated sequences. Isaac and Mary, caught in an electrical storm in Central Park, duck inside. What follows is one of cinema’s most elegant depictions of how two people who should not fall in love begin to fall in love anyway: the darkness, the projected stars, the pretense of looking at the universe while actually studying each other.
The building you see today is different from the one Allen filmed — the glass sphere of the Rose Center replaced the original hemispherical dome. But the approach from Central Park West, the sense of arriving at a place that promises to put human concerns in cosmic proportion, remains. The planetarium is open to the public; tickets are available through the American Museum of Natural History. The pilgrim move here is to sit in the Space Theater during a show and let the ceiling dissolve into stars, and to think about what it was in that image — the smallness of human beings under an indifferent sky — that Allen kept returning to, film after film, as both comedy and consolation.
Riverside Drive: The Walk That Doesn’t End
In Hannah and Her Sisters, Hannah visits her parents at 137 Riverside Drive — another real address, another building the camera treats as both location and meaning. Riverside Drive, running along the Hudson from the 70s up through the 100s, is the UWS location Allen used most consistently for walking scenes: characters moving through the neighborhood, talking, working things out, failing to work things out.
The walk along Riverside Park — the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed strip of parkland between Riverside Drive and the Hudson — is one of the few places in Allen’s New York that has genuine breathing room. The great apartment buildings on Riverside Drive are less iconic than those on Central Park West but often more beautiful: more varied in their ornamentation, more human in their scale. Walking south from the 100s toward the 70s, the river visible through the trees, you understand why his characters were always walking — the city rewarded it, and the conversations you could have while moving felt different from the conversations you had while standing still.
Tavern on the Green and the Lincoln Center Axis
In Crimes and Misdemeanors, the morally compromised documentary filmmaker Cliff Stern (Allen) meets the television producer Lester (Alan Alda) at Tavern on the Green, the ornate restaurant situated in Central Park at West 67th Street. The restaurant closed in 2009, went through a long renovation, and reopened in 2014 in a substantially altered form. Its appearance in the film — all fairy lights and nervous social ambition — captures something about the UWS’s relationship to its own prosperity: the slightly embarrassed enjoyment of things that are undeniably pleasant.
From Tavern on the Green, walk north on Central Park West to Lincoln Center, the performing arts complex at Columbus Avenue between 62nd and 65th Streets. Lincoln Center appears throughout Allen’s work as both landmark and symbol — the place where high culture lives in the city, where the Philharmonic plays and the Metropolitan Opera sings and where, in Manhattan, Isaac takes his 17-year-old girlfriend Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) to concerts without any apparent sense that the arrangement is unusual. (It is unusual. The film knows this, even if its protagonist doesn’t, and part of the discomfort of rewatching Manhattan now is that the audience has learned to see what Allen may have hoped we wouldn’t.)
The Lincoln Center plaza, with its central fountain and the three main buildings arranged around it — Avery Fisher Hall (now David Geffen Hall) to the left, the Metropolitan Opera in the center, the New York State Theater (now David H. Koch Theater) to the right — is worth visiting on its own terms as a piece of mid-century urban planning that has aged into something almost cozy. The fountain is still there. The plaza still fills on summer evenings with people coming and going from performances. The Film Society of Lincoln Center, which programs the New York Film Festival each fall and runs year-round repertory and new cinema programming, is housed at Alice Tully Hall on the complex’s west side — a genuine resource for any cinephile in the city.
Annie Hall’s Upper West Side: The Thalia and What Replaced It
In Annie Hall, Alvy Singer (Allen) is a creature of the UWS repertory cinema culture of the 1970s. He drags Annie to the Thalia Cinema, then located at 2537 Broadway at West 95th Street, to see Ingmar Bergman films and Max Ophüls retrospectives. The Thalia was one of the great neighborhood movie houses of that era — a place where a certain kind of New Yorker went not just to see films but to perform being the kind of person who saw those films.
The Thalia closed in 1987. The space went through various incarnations before reopening as Symphony Space, which continues to operate at 2537 Broadway as a performing arts venue. It no longer shows films as its primary programming, though it hosts occasional screenings. Standing in front of it now, you are standing in front of a specific kind of loss: the loss of the neighborhood movie house as a social institution, the disappearance of the place where you went to belong to a community of people who cared about cinema.
That loss is, in some ways, the subject of Allen’s early films — not stated outright, but felt in the way his characters use the cinema as a sanctuary and a reference system, a shared vocabulary that allows them to say what they cannot say directly. When Alvy makes Annie sit through the beginning of The Sorrow and the Pity rather than miss a minute, he is not being pedantic. He is asserting that the cinema is a place that demands full presence, that it cannot be entered in the middle without a kind of violence done to it.
Facing the Complications
The desk specification for this series calls for being “honest about complications” when writing about Woody Allen, and the cinephile pilgrim deserves that honesty without evasion.
In August 1992, Mia Farrow alleged that Allen had sexually molested their adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow, then seven years old, at Farrow’s home in Connecticut. Allen denied the allegation. Investigations by New York state child welfare services and a report from Yale-New Haven Hospital found insufficient evidence to support the charge; the Connecticut state prosecutor declined to file charges, though he stated publicly that there was probable cause but that Dylan was too fragile to face a trial. Dylan Farrow, now an adult, has maintained her account consistently across decades — in a 2013 Vanity Fair interview, a 2014 New York Times open letter, a 2017 Los Angeles Times op-ed, and a 2018 CBS News television interview. The HBO documentary series Allen v. Farrow (2021) presented Dylan’s account in detail. Allen published a memoir, Apropos of Nothing, in 2020, disputing the allegations.
The situation is contested and unresolved. There is no verdict. There is a person who says she was harmed, and a filmmaker who says she was not, and a body of work that exists in the space between those two accounts. The cinephile pilgrim cannot resolve this, and should not pretend to. What they can do is hold both things at once: the genuine achievement of the films, which are real, and the genuine weight of Dylan Farrow’s account, which is also real. Walking the Upper West Side with Allen’s cinema in mind means walking with both.
Some viewers have stopped watching. Some have not. Both positions are defensible. What is not defensible is the pretense that the question doesn’t exist, that the art exists in a sealed chamber untouched by the life of the person who made it. It doesn’t. The Langham at 135 Central Park West is beautiful and complicated, and so is the film that was shot there.
Where to Watch Allen in New York
Allen’s films continue to circulate in New York’s repertory ecosystem. Film Forum, at 209 West Houston Street in the West Village, has programmed Allen retrospectives in the past and maintains one of the strongest repertory calendars in the city. The Metrograph, at 7 Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, programs repertory cinema with genuine curatorial intelligence and has occasionally screened Allen’s work as part of broader thematic series. The Film Society of Lincoln Center, through its programming at Alice Tully Hall, is another venue where his films appear in context.
For current screenings, check the programming calendars at filmforum.org, metrograph.com, and filmlinc.org directly — repertory programming is announced on rolling schedules, often four to six weeks in advance. No specific Allen screenings are scheduled at press time, but the city’s repertory culture is rich enough that his work appears regularly, usually without the fanfare of a dedicated retrospective, simply as part of the ongoing conversation about American cinema that New York’s best theaters maintain.
If you want to watch at home before walking the locations, the suggested sequence is: Annie Hall first (to understand the register), then Manhattan (to see the UWS as a character), then Hannah and Her Sisters (to visit the Langham knowing what you know), then Crimes and Misdemeanors (to think about moral accountability alongside the beauty). That is not a comfortable sequence. It is not meant to be.
The Walk, End to End
The full Woody Allen Upper West Side walk runs roughly three miles and takes between two and three hours depending on how long you linger. Begin at Zabar’s (2245 Broadway at 80th Street), walk east to Central Park West, south to the Langham (135 Central Park West), north to the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium (Central Park West at 81st Street), continue north and west to Riverside Drive, walk south along the river back toward the 70s, cut east to Lincoln Center (Columbus Avenue at 62nd-65th Streets), and end at Tavern on the Green in Central Park (Central Park at West 67th Street), now a restaurant open to the public, where you can sit with a coffee and think about Crimes and Misdemeanors and what it means that a film about a man who arranges a murder and is never caught is one of Allen’s most morally serious works — a film in which the universe does not punish wrongdoing, and a filmmaker who seems to have known something about that particular condition.
The Q and B trains stop at 72nd Street (Central Park West entrance) and 81st Street (Museum of Natural History). The 1, 2, and 3 trains serve 72nd Street on Broadway, putting you steps from Zabar’s. The walk between them is the point.
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A Final Note on the Light
There is a shot near the end of Manhattan in which Isaac, having done the wrong thing and then tried to undo it, runs through the streets of the Upper West Side to Tracy’s apartment. It is filmed in that amber late-afternoon light that the neighborhood specializes in, and Allen’s cinematographer Gordon Willis — working in black and white, always in black and white on these early films — makes the city look like a memory even as it is happening. This is the paradox at the heart of all the best Allen films: they look like nostalgia, but they were made in real time, about a city that was actually there.
Walk those streets. The light is still doing what it always did. The buildings are still standing. The films are still there if you want them. And the complications are still there too, which is not a reason to walk away but a reason to walk more carefully, more honestly, with your eyes open to what the camera showed and what it chose not to show.
That is the pilgrim’s task: not to resolve, but to see.
