All About Eve | "21" Club, New York — Lunch With a Girl Who Wants Everything

Karen Richards goes to lunch expecting an apology and gets an ultimatum instead. Eve has already worked out what she wants, who can give it to her, and what it will cost the woman sitting across the table. The scene plays out inside "21", and the production did it the way studios did in 1950: the second unit photographed the West 52nd Street exterior on location before shooting began, then rebuilt the dining room on a Fox sound stage and dropped the real street in behind the windows by rear projection.

The address earned that shorthand honestly. Jack Kriendler and Charlie Berns moved their speakeasy here in 1930 and built a bar that could destroy its own evidence — shelves on pivots, chutes into the cellar, a two-ton door disguised as a brick wall that federal agents never once opened. The painted iron lawn jockeys crowding the balcony arrived later, gifts from racing owners who ate here.

The restaurant closed in December 2020 and the doors have stayed shut. That makes this the strangest stop on the route. Come to the sidewalk under the balcony and count the jockeys, still in their owners' silks, still lined up over a doorway nobody walks through. The place Eve chose for her ambush is now the one location in the film that is purely a facade.

Location: 21 West 52nd Street, Manhattan. Photo: Angelo Rizzuto, December 1956, Library of Congress (no known restrictions on publication).