Taxi Driver (Dir: Martin Scorsese, 1976).
Doorway, 226 East 13th St. (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue), Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.
Martin Scorsese is known for using real locations, and to capture the gritty, scummy breeding ground of dirty crime of New York in the 70’s background for Taxi Driver, he used some of 70’s New York’s least attractive addresses. For that reason most of the key external locations have been bulldozed, the only one important enough to the film to visit is Iris’s (Jodie Foster) hotel doorway at 226 East 13th Street in the East Village. It’s not much to look at but it’s a moving moment in the film and if you’re a Scorsese fan it’s worth seeing before it’s removed like the rest of ‘Taxi Driver’’s New York.
Tiffany & Co. for alfresco breakfasts
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Dir: Blake Edwards, 1961). Tiffany & Co., 727 Fifth Ave., Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA.
Strangely, in Truman Capote’s novel, Holly Golightly says she calms down by visiting Tiffany & Co. on 57th Street, which is where I went looking for the film location from ‘Breakfast at Tiffany‘s‘, only to find that the most common name for Holly’s Tiffany’s is Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue, which is a far grander name that I’m sure Holly would have much preferred (but a long way from where I started looking.). It is actually a calming experience inside as long as you don’t get too paranoid about people watching you thinking you can’t afford to buy anything…
The external shots of Holly’s apartment building were filmed at 169 East 71st St., Manhattan, it’s a private residence so you can’t go in, but there’s nothing to see, all the internal apartment scenes were filmed in the studio (is that why New York apartments in films always seem so big?).
