The Amazing Spider-Man 2|Empire–Fulton Ferry, DUMBO — the stones Peter and Harry skimmed

Two men who were friends at eleven meet again on about forty feet of shingle at the bottom of New Dock Street, and skim stones into the East River while the Manhattan Bridge stands over them. It is the quietest scene in a very loud film, and it works because the place is genuinely quiet at that hour.

This is Empire–Fulton Ferry, the oldest section of Brooklyn Bridge Park and once a working landing where boats crossed to Manhattan before either bridge existed. The cobbles underfoot are Belgian block, laid for cart traffic to the warehouses. The beach is a real tidal edge, which is a rare thing to find within sight of Wall Street, and it is why there are stones there to throw at all.

The production worked this corner hard — the shoreline, the trains crossing overhead, and Jane's Carousel a hundred feet away in its glass box. That carousel was built in 1922 by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company for a park in Youngstown, Ohio. Jane Walentas bought it as a wreck and spent roughly twenty-five years stripping it back to bare wood and repainting all forty-eight horses by hand. It opened here in 2011 inside a pavilion by Jean Nouvel, and fourteen months later Hurricane Sandy put several feet of river through the pavilion; the horses came through it.

Go at low tide and stand on the shingle facing the bridge. Every few minutes a subway crosses overhead with a sound like a long sheet of metal being bent. That noise is underneath the entire scene, and no sound designer put it there.

Photograph by Anthony Quintano, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.