21 Jump Street|West Jefferson High School — The Stadium on the West Bank

Cross the Mississippi from downtown New Orleans and the land flattens out into Harvey, a West Bank town of drainage canals, low houses and enormous sky. At 2200 Eighth Street sits West Jefferson High School, and behind it the Harold "Hoss" Memtsas Stadium, a set of open bleachers around a running track and a football field.

Location guides to the film put the track and field material here. It is the kind of place a production borrows without fanfare: no permits to close a highway, no historic facade to protect, just an athletic plant with room for cameras and a lighting rig, available across a Louisiana summer while the students are gone.

The film needed it because Jenko's whole identity is physical. He is the one who can run, jump, hit, and who has to sit still in AP Chemistry and discover he is not stupid. A stadium gives that character somewhere to be right about himself before the movie takes it away.

West Jefferson is an active public high school, so the stadium is best seen on a game night or from the street. Friday nights in autumn, the lights are on and the stands are loud, and it looks nothing like a film set.

Stand at the fence at the end of the track and look back across the flat ground toward the river levee. This is the New Orleans that never makes the postcards, and half of this movie was shot in it.