American Gangster|St. Martin's Episcopal Church — The Precinct That Was Really a Sanctuary

Richie Roberts spends this film in rooms nobody wants to be in. A squad room where handing in a million dollars found in a car trunk makes him radioactive. A borrowed task-force office nobody has cleaned. For the narcotics bureau exterior on Lenox Avenue, the production used a church.

230 Lenox Avenue, at West 122nd Street, is St. Martin's Episcopal Church, and it does not look like anything else on the avenue. William A. Potter finished it in 1889 in dark, rough-faced brownstone — Romanesque Revival, cruciform, arched openings, three enormous windows filling the gable end that faces Lenox. The square tower carries a copper pyramidal steeple that still rises clear of the rooflines for blocks in every direction, exactly as the nineteenth-century guidebooks said it would.

The congregation that made the building famous arrived in 1928, when St. Martin's — a largely West Indian and African American parish — bought it and stayed. The tower holds a carillon reckoned among the finest in the city, and for decades those bells were the sound of that stretch of Harlem on a Sunday morning. It is a designated New York City individual landmark, and it has spent years on preservation watch lists while money is raised for the roof and the tower.

Come at it from the south side of 122nd Street in the late afternoon. The brownstone goes red, the copper goes green, and you understand immediately why a location scout hunting institutional weight stopped walking here — and why the film needed a building that could look like the law and feel like a refuge in the same shot.

Photo: Pexels (free licence) — a Harlem church facade, illustrative rather than St. Martin's itself.