The Amazing Spider-Man|36 Fuller Place, Windsor Terrace — the porch light on a one-block street

Fuller Place is one block long, and most people walk past the mouth of it without turning their heads. It runs south off Prospect Avenue in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn: two facing rows of wood-frame houses with front porches, low stoops, hedges kept at waist height, a street that has survived mostly because nobody in a hundred years found a reason to knock it down. Marc Webb's production found the Parker house here, at number 36, and shot the exteriors that hold the whole film together — the door Peter comes out of, the steps Uncle Ben stands on, the porch Aunt May waits under.

The film needed a house that felt inherited rather than chosen, and this is exactly that. The clapboard is painted and repainted. The porch is deep enough to sit on. You can see the whole block in one look, which is the point: Peter Parker's origin is a story about a small place, and this street is small in a way that a soundstage cannot fake.

Nothing marks it. No plaque, no arrow, no gift shop. It is a working residential block, so the visit is a slow walk to the dead end and back on the public sidewalk, nothing more — the people who live here did not sign up for it. Come on a weekday morning, when the street is quiet, and the thing that strikes you is the noise level. You can hear a screen door close from forty feet away.

Photo: a Windsor Terrace streetscape a few blocks from Fuller Place, via Wikimedia Commons. Location confirmed by movie-locations.com and The Cinemaholic.