The Age of Adaline | Grant Avenue, San Francisco Chinatown — the front door of a woman with no name of her own

For all the Vancouver doubling, the production went to San Francisco for the exteriors that establish where Adaline actually lives, and it put her on Grant Avenue in Chinatown, around number 708. She comes out of the building, gets into a cab, and the street behind her is doing something the script never says out loud.

Grant is the oldest street in San Francisco. It was laid out in 1834 as Calle de la Fundación, became Dupont Street, and was renamed after Ulysses S. Grant following the 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed everything here. What you walk through now was rebuilt in the years right after that disaster, deliberately styled with upturned eaves, balconies and lanterns to make the neighbourhood legible to outsiders who wanted it gone. The Dragon Gate at Bush Street, the arch most visitors photograph, only went up in 1970.

So the street itself is a survivor that reinvented its own face to keep going. Putting a woman with a rotating set of identities on this particular sidewalk is a good instinct, whether or not anyone intended it.

Start at the Dragon Gate and walk north six blocks to Broadway, past the herbalists and the bakeries and the shops selling the same painted fans. Around the 700 block, look up above the awnings at the brickwork. Every building on it is younger than the street and older than anyone using it.

Location photo via Wikimedia Commons.