21 Jump Street|Historic St. James AME Church — The Chapel That Became a Police Station

The sign outside says 222 North Roman Street. In the film it says Jump Street, and two of the worst patrol officers in the department are standing on the sidewalk arguing about whether a church counts as a headquarters.

The building is real and it is much older than the joke. The congregation was founded in 1844 and the sanctuary went up in 1848, making it the first church of African Methodism planted in the Deep South. Brick, Neo-Gothic, pointed windows, a facade that looks stern rather than ornate. Later remodeling work is credited to the New Orleans firm Diboll & Owen. It went onto the National Register of Historic Places in October 1982, three decades before a Sony comedy borrowed its front door.

This is where Captain Dickson gives the speech about a canceled program from the eighties being revived because nobody in the department has an original idea, and it is where Schmidt kneels in front of a plaster Korean Jesus and asks for help he does not deserve. The production dressed the interior. The exterior needed nothing. That squat brick face with the arched entry is exactly what a movie wants when it needs a building that looks abandoned by the city and still standing on principle.

The church is on the edge of Tremé, a few blocks inland from Louis Armstrong Park, in a stretch of the Seventh Ward where the houses are low and the street is quiet on a weekday. It is an active congregation, so the polite move is to admire it from the sidewalk unless you are there for a service or have called ahead.

Stand across Roman Street and look at the door. The film made it a punchline. The plaque beside it records something a lot harder to earn: a Black congregation that has held this corner since before the Civil War.