The Amazing Spider-Man 2|Fort Schuyler — the granite pentagon that became Ravencroft

Electro is driven to the Ravencroft Institute for the Criminally Insane, and the gate he goes through belongs to a coastal artillery fort on the last point of the Bronx.

Fort Schuyler was built between 1833 and 1845 on Throggs Neck, where the East River widens into Long Island Sound. It is a granite pentagon, laid out to cross its fire with Fort Totten on the Queens shore and close the back door to New York harbour. It never fired at an enemy. By the Civil War, rifled artillery had made masonry forts like it obsolete, and it spent the following decades as a prison camp for Confederate officers, then a storage depot, then very nearly nothing at all.

Since 1934 it has been the campus of SUNY Maritime College. The casemates cut for thirty-two-pounder guns now hold classrooms, the Stephen B. Luce Library and the Maritime Industry Museum — the museum is open to the public, though the hours follow the college calendar, so check before you make the trip. The Throgs Neck Bridge runs overhead. Training ships tie up at the pier. The stone is a weathered grey that reads on film exactly as intended: an institution nobody walks out of.

Come in past the north gate and follow the seawall around to the fort's water face. That angled granite with the Sound behind it is the shot — and unlike almost every interior in this film, you can put your hand flat against it.

Photograph by Matt Green, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, via Flickr.