Across the Universe | Museum of the City of New York — the building that keeps the decade the film is arguing with

At Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street the museum sits on the edge of Central Park with its back to Harlem and its face to the park, a red-brick Georgian Colonial Revival block that Joseph Freedlander designed and the city opened in 1932. Marble trim, a pedimented centre, a broad flight of steps. It looks like a mansion and behaves like an archive.

The production used this building, and there is a neatness to that choice which is hard to miss. Across the Universe is a period film about New York in the late sixties, and the Museum of the City of New York is the institution whose entire job is holding on to what that city looked like — the photographs of the marches, the theatre posters, the toy shops and shopfronts and street scenes that anyone dressing a 1968 set would go to first. The film shot at the place where its own research lives.

Inside, the collection runs from Dutch New Amsterdam to last year. The permanent gallery walks the city's whole arc in one long room, and the temporary shows are usually the sharper draw: activism, housing, nightlife, the arguments the city keeps having with itself. It is one of the few museums in Manhattan where the subject and the location are the same thing.

Come up the steps from Fifth Avenue and turn around before you go in. From the top stair you are looking across the park wall into the northern end of Central Park, at almost exactly the sightline a New Yorker would have had standing there in the year the film is set.