Almost 58 Pike Street

[66 Pike Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

This photograph is as close as I’m going to get to 58 Pike Street, in a neighborhood called Two Bridges (the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge). That’s the Manhattan Bridge behind the laundry. The Pike Street address is a crucial one in the noir Where the Sidewalk Ends (dir. Otto Preminger, 1950). And in the movie it looks so real. But it’s a set.

[Detective Sergeant Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) is about to call on a suspect. Click for a larger view.]

The set even includes a basement apartment, where Dixon sees Mrs. Tribaum (Grace Mills), whose radio plays as she sleeps in a chair. She will later explain that she’s taken to sleeping there since her husband died.

[Click for a larger view.]

Though the IMDb entry for Where the Sidewalk Ends lists 58 Pike Street as a filming location, there was no such address. As an extraordinary post about the movie at NYC in Film establishes, there was no 58: the Pike Street numbers jumped from 56 to 60, and no building stood that matched the building we see in the movie. And no building today matches the one in the WPA tax photographs.

Where the Sidewalk Ends is streaming at the Criterion Channel as part of the 1950: Peak Noir series. The movie is, indeed, peak.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)