American Gangster|Brooklyn Navy Yard — Where the War Came Home in Crates

Frank Lucas's real edge is not violence. It is logistics. He flies to Bangkok, buys at source, cuts out every middleman between the poppy field and 116th Street, and then moves the product home the one way nobody searches: inside the United States military's own supply chain, alongside the coffins and the cargo. The film's military depot material was shot at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The Yard is the right place for that idea to live. Founded in 1801, it launched the Maine in 1890 and the Missouri in 1944, and at its wartime peak it employed something like seventy thousand people across more than two hundred acres of dry docks, gantry cranes and brick warehouses. The Navy shut it down in 1966 — six years before the period the film covers — and it spent decades as a half-used industrial estate. That neglect is exactly why it still held the untouched surfaces a 1970s shoot needs: unpainted brick, rail track in the roadway, loading bays built for a scale nobody uses anymore.

It is not a ruin now. The Yard is a working manufacturing campus again, with several hundred businesses inside the fence, and you can walk in. Building 92 at 63 Flushing Avenue — the restored Marine Commandant's residence from the 1850s — is the visitor centre, with exhibitions on the Yard's history and the departure point for public tours of the site.

Stand at the edge of a dry dock and the plot explains itself. Anything can disappear inside a place built this big, and for a while it did.

Photo: Pexels (free licence) — cranes at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.