The Amazing Spider-Man|Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House — the police headquarters you can walk into for free

Captain Stacy's police headquarters is a Beaux-Arts pile at the foot of Broadway, and unlike almost every other building in this film, you can go inside and stand in it without a badge or a ticket.

Cass Gilbert finished it in 1907 to collect duty on everything arriving by sea, back when that revenue paid for a large share of the federal government. Daniel Chester French's four seated women — Asia, America, Europe, Africa — still sit on the Bowling Green steps, each with her continent's freight piled around her. The stone is granite and limestone, the columns are Corinthian, and the whole thing was designed to make an importer feel small before he ever opened his wallet. That is precisely why a film needed it for the NYPD: authority you can read at a glance.

Customs left in 1973. Since 1994 the building has housed the George Gustav Heye Center of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, and admission is free. Walk through the Bowling Green doors, past the scenes shot on those steps, and into the elliptical rotunda where Reginald Marsh painted eight harbor murals in 1937 under a skylight ceiling.

Go up the steps slowly. The film shot people hurrying up them; the building was built for the opposite, and the difference is the whole pleasure of the visit.

Location confirmed by movie-locations.com and The Cinemaholic.