21 Jump Street|Crescent City Connection — The Span That Held the Production Together

Twin cantilever bridges, 1958 and 1988, carrying US 90 Business over the Mississippi between downtown New Orleans and the West Bank. Locals still call the older one the Greater New Orleans Bridge. Together they are the Crescent City Connection, and for a few months in the summer of 2011 they were the commute of an entire film crew.

That is the unglamorous truth behind this movie's geography. The church that plays Jump Street headquarters sits in Tremé. The high school stands in Old Jefferson. The stadium is out in Harvey. The chase runs through the CBD. Every one of those trips crosses this river, and this is where you cross it. The bridge shows up in the film the way it shows up in life here: in the background of the chase, on the horizon behind the West Bank exteriors, a grey steel fact you stop noticing.

It is worth noticing. The 1958 span was the longest cantilever bridge in the world when it opened. Standing on the levee at Algiers Point and looking back, you get the shot every location scout in Louisiana has taken: the towers of Poydras Street stacked behind the trusses, downtown and the West Bank in one frame.

Drive it, or take the Algiers Point ferry from the foot of Canal Street and watch it from the water for the price of a bus fare.

The film pretends to be set in a nameless California town. The bridge is the one thing in the frame that could never be anywhere but here.