The Amazing Spider-Man 2|Main Street, Rochester — 360 miles upstate for one chase

The armoured truck full of stolen plutonium does not spend its whole chase in Manhattan. For a good part of that opening sequence the production drove three hundred and sixty miles up the state and closed Main Street in Rochester.

This was the first Spider-Man film shot entirely within New York State, and the largest production the state had ever hosted. Rochester got the material that needed long straight runs and a downtown that could actually be emptied — the kind of thing Midtown will not sell you at any price, for any number of nights. Local crews were hired by the hundred. The blocks around Main and State went dark and stayed dark. A city whose own film economy had contracted along with Kodak found itself standing in for the borough that made Kodak's name famous.

Hold on to that irony while you are there, because it is the real reason to come. Rochester built the twentieth century's image industry: Eastman Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, Xerox. The Kodak Tower is a short walk from the chase route. George Eastman's house on East Avenue is the oldest photography museum in the world. And out at 900 East Main Street the Rochester Armory still stands, brick and crenellated, the sort of building the city has in quantity and Manhattan does not.

Walk east along Main Street from the Genesee crossing. It looks nothing whatever like New York City, which is precisely the trick — for about ninety seconds of screen time, that is exactly what it is.

Photograph by Bill Badzo, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, via Flickr.