The Amazing Spider-Man 2|1 East 91st Street — the Fifth Avenue front of the Osborn house

Harry Osborn is summoned home to watch his father die, and home is a limestone palazzo on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 91st Street. The film needed a house that could believably hold three generations of inherited money and one inherited disease. It found one that had been built for exactly that kind of fortune.

1 East 91st Street was finished in 1918 for Otto Hermann Kahn, the banker who kept the Metropolitan Opera solvent for two decades, to a design by J. Armstrong Stenhouse with C. P. H. Gilbert. Kahn wanted an Italian Renaissance palazzo and got one without compromise: rusticated stone laid in courses that get finer as they rise, a carriage arch instead of a stoop, an interior courtyard you reach through that arch rather than from the pavement. It is frequently called the last of the great Fifth Avenue mansions to be built in that manner, and it cost something close to a million dollars when a good townhouse cost fifty thousand.

Kahn died in 1934 and the Convent of the Sacred Heart bought the house. It has been a girls' school ever since, connected internally to the Burden mansion next door. That is the honest limit of this stop: the rooms are classrooms now, not a set anyone can tour, and the film only ever needed the front.

Which is all a visitor needs. Stand across Fifth Avenue with Central Park at your back — the reservoir path is thirty seconds away — and look at the carriage arch. Harry arrives through that opening, and the stone around it has not been altered since Kahn's masons left.

Photograph by Eden, Janine and Jim, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.