Atlas of Imagined Cities E-Book

Matt Brown

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 672

Beschreibung

From the Ghostbusters HQ in New York to Nemo's fish tank in Sydney, from the Phantom of the Opera's Parisian lair to scenes from Grand Theft Auto in LA, this is an amazing atlas of imaginary locations in real-life cities around the world. Locations from film, TV, books, computer games and comics are ingeniously plotted on a series of beautiful vintage-looking maps. Feauturing 14 of the world's greatest cities, the maps show exactly where your favourite characters lived, loved, worked and played, and where iconic scenes took place. The locations have been painstakingly tracked down, mapped, annotated and wittily divulged by the authors, and an extensive index helps you find them all. Within the pages of this book, you'll discover: • Where in London super-spies James Bond and George Smiley are neighbours. • The route of the exciting San Francisco car chase in Bullitt. • The Tokyo homes of all the magical girls from the classic Sailor Moon anime. And many more fascinating locations drawn from the world's imagination. Accompanying the maps are illuminating essays that explain how the authors came to their decisions, along with explorations of the key locations and fun timelines of imaginary events. Find out how to get to Sesame Street, where to join Starfleet and thousands of other places besides, in this indispensable guidebook to all those places you always wanted to visit – if only they were real. 

Leseprobe

INTRODUCTION

NEW YORK

THE BIGGER APPLE

LOS ANGELES

CONFIDENT NOIR

SAN FRANCISCO

SCI-FI SPECTACULAR

WASHINGTON DC

COVERT CAPITAL

CHICAGO

THAT MEAN OLD WINDY CITY

NEW ORLEANS

A BAYOU TAPESTRY

MIAMI

BAD BOYS AND GOLDEN GIRLS

RIO DE JANEIRO

CITY AT THE FEET OF GOD

LONDON

UNREAL CITY

PARISA

TALE OF A HUNDRED CITIES

VENICE

THE ORIGINAL WATERWORLD

BERLIN

THE CITY ON THE EDGE

SYDNEY

(SOAP) OPERA HOUSE

TOKYO

THE MATCHSTICK CITY

LOCATION INDEX

SOURCE INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Welcome to a street atlas of the imagination. Over the following pages, you’ll visit 14 world cities, mapped and pinned to guide you to thousands of well-known locations. But here’s the catch: none of them are real.

The Atlas of Imagined Cities supposes that all the great characters and locations from fiction really do inhabit the same world. Our world. From its pages, you can picture the Three Musketeers crossing the Seine to visit the Phantom of the Opera, or Biggles, Dorian Grey and the Bridgerton family arranging a neighbourhood WhatsApp group. This is a world where Othello and Tom Ripley share a view of the Grand Canal, and where Captain America rubs his star-spangled shoulders with Dana Scully. It is the ultimate shared universe.

This atlas is also a sequel. Our first volume, Atlas of Imagined Places: from Lilliput to Gotham City, was a worldwide synthesis of fictitious locations. Towns like Amity Island, Erinsborough, Salem’s Lot and Metropolis were plotted alongside invented countries such as Wakanda, Erewhon and Ruritania, and even continents like Atlantis and Lemuria. The Atlas of Imagined Cities, however, digs deeper. We’re now exploring the fictional realm at street level, to discover how authors, film-makers and game designers have used real cities as a canvas for their fantasies.

The heart of any city is its people. So, too, with our imagined cities. Most of the locations on our maps are the homes of famous characters. Herein, you’ll find the likes of James Bond, Carrie Mathison, Dirty Harry, Annie Hall, the Blues Brothers and even Bugs Bunny. We’ve also mapped fictional cafés, bars, nightclubs, schools, hotels, airports and at least a couple of tombs. To add a bit of spice, we’ve also included pointers to some of fiction’s more memorable events. Track down where Harry met Sally, or Sherlock first perceived Watson. Follow the route of Bus 2525 from Speed, or the ludicrous gondola chase from Moonraker. And discover how the Golden Gate Bridge has been destroyed in at least seven ways. We’ve also woven in some of the most famous quotes in movie history. ‘Hasta la vista, baby!’, but where?

As we came to plot these motley elements, we found that the cities began to take on characters and lives of their own. Fictional Los Angeles is a land of swanky hillside mansions. Faux-Tokyo is 50 per cent high school. The fictive action in Paris, Berlin and Rio is evenly dispersed, whereas cities like San Francisco and Sydney show clusters of activity. We’ve coined the word ‘fictropolis’ to describe this agglomeration of a given city’s fictional characteristics, as distinct from the real city, the metropolis, which it reflects. It is a useful word in the context of this atlas. We can say that London is a more bookish fictropolis than Sydney, for example, or that the New Orleans fictropolis is focused on the French Quarter. But how did we choose our cities in the first place?

14 WORLD CITIESTO EXPLORE

The task of narrowing down the atlas to just 14 cities was not an easy one. We had to strike a balance. On the one hand, the chosen metropolises should be reasonably familiar to a majority of the readership; on the other, we wanted to create something with geographic diversity. Some cities are absolutely essential, of course. London was the first to be mapped. As the city of Sherlock Holmes, the Dickens pantheon, James Bond, Harry Potter, Mary Poppins and a constellation of other household names, London was the anchor of the project. Indeed, we trialled the concept of mapping fictional addresses on the Londonist website in 2019. From there, we turned to Los Angeles and Hollywood, and the endlessly revisited grid of New York City. Tokyo, as an epicentre of anime, manga, giant monsters and mecha, was another attractive candidate. These four cities proved so fictionally fecund that we’ve expanded them over four map pages each.

Other cities presented themselves as natural fits. Washington DC, as the US capital, is no stranger to works of suspense, intrigue and political drama. Chicago has its mob history, but also such diverse works as the films of John Hughes and sci-fi blockbusters like I, Robot. San Francisco, Miami and New Orleans refract US culture through skewed prisms, as we’ll see later on.

Beyond the US and UK, we’ve included the cities that offer the most grist to the fictive mill. Paris has proved a popular setting for classic literature, modern movies and stage musicals (Phantom, Les Mis, Hunchback ... really, it’s only a matter of time before someone develops an all-singing, all-dancing Count of Monte Cristo). Sydney is the undisputed home of the soap opera. Venice’s canals are the background to a thousand romantic novels and movies. Rio offers sun-kissed locations where glamour and poverty sit cheek-by-jowl. Berlin is fictively scarred by its war history and subsequent partition. Yet, as the maps show, these simple stereotypes are only the beginning of the story. Dig deeper into a city’s fiction, and you’ll discover that each is a complex, multifarious thing, just as cities are in real life.

Other cities almost made the cut. Boston, with its rich history and academic firepower, is another common setting for movies and novels, and its location at the heart of ‘Lovecraft Country’ could have thrown up some intriguing possibilities. To the people of Seattle, Toronto, Hong Kong, Dublin, Edinburgh, Seoul, Mumbai, Rome and Vegas – we apologize. These cities would also have made for fascinating maps. Perhaps a ‘Volume 2’ might be in order but, for now, space does not allow for their exploration. I mean, just look how fat the index is already.

CHOOSING WHATTO MAP

Mapping a fictropolis is a subjective exercise. The sources of inspiration are essentially infinite. How many novels and movies have been set in London, or LA, or New York City? We could never hope to be comprehensive, nor anywhere close. Plus, new creative works appear all the time. To make this atlas possible, we’ve had to make sweeping editorial decisions, followed by thousands of micro-choices about what does and does not make it through. You won’t agree with them all, but that’s OK. Indeed, half the fun of this atlas is trying to spot what we’ve missed or deliberately left out.

We’ve drawn on all genres to create this atlas, from rom-com to zom-com, kids’ animations to police procedurals. You may find a slight over-abundance of certain genres, however, such as sci-fi, fantasy and disaster movies. For this we make no apologies. There’s a certain joy to finding mermaid kingdoms, spaceship crash sites and holes to the centre of the Earth on maps like these, especially when they rub bathetically against the homes of fictional detectives and soap characters.

You may find that the maps are also biased somewhat towards more recent material. The reason for this is twofold. The first is familiarity. Generally speaking, movies and shows from the past few decades will be fresher in more minds than older productions. But the second reason is more fundamental. In the early decades of film and television, almost all the action was shot on sound stages and sets. Location filming was a rare and expensive luxury. Unless the dialogue reveals an address, we have very few clues as to where a particular scene is ‘meant to be’. This limitation does not apply to novels, however, and you’ll find numerous classic works of literature represented within these pages.

And where do we stop? Wikipedia maintains a list of ‘Novels set in London’ that runs to over 1,000 examples. That’s just for works that Wikipedia editors have deemed meritorious enough to deserve a page on the site. A comprehensive list would probably reach the hundreds of thousands – and that’s for just one medium in one city. Throw in films, TV shows, video games and other formats, and the task is infinite. We decided very early on that we would focus our efforts on relatively mainstream and well-known sources. We’re more likely, for example, to include a TV show that ran for seven series and was syndicated around the world than one that lasted just one season and was never broadcast outside Australia. That said, you’ll also find numerous locations that could never be described as ‘mainstream’, whenever it amused us to include them. Ultimately, mapping the fictional is more of an art form than a science.

WHERE TODROP THE PIN

Inevitably, some points on the map were easier to place than others. We know the Hunchback of Notre-Dame lives in Notre-Dame cathedral because ... well, it’s obvious. Most of the time, though, we have to use detective work or make an educated guess. Even when we have a possible location, there may still be choices to make. The following four rules helped us to make these decisions.

1. When possible, a location is mapped to where it is ‘meant to be’, rather than where it was filmed.

For movies and television shows, the temptation is to go with the filming location. This is a risky strategy. Many productions are filmed on stage sets, or shot ‘on location’ in a very different part of the city or even world to where they’re set (usually for budgetary reasons). Therefore, our prime directive is to map to the place best in keeping with the narrative, not where it happened to be filmed. Often, however, the shooting location is the only clue we have, and we will fall back on this if it doesn’t contradict the film’s narrative.

2. You have to be fictional to appear in these pages.

It has sometimes been tempting to include real-life characters like Al Capone and Eliot Ness (from The Untouchables), when these figures loom large in cinema history. But we’ve decided to stick tightly to the fictional. Regrettably, that means that exceptional films like Milk, The Wolf of Wall Street, Goodfellas and Vice are left out of these pages.

3. When a story exists in more than one medium, map the one that most people are familiar with.

The Godfather is a hugely successful novel as well as an Academy Award-winning movie. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a novel, radio show, TV show, movie, computer game and play. Marvel and DC’s characters are equally at home on the big screen and in the comic book. It’s common for storylines and characters to diverge between retellings (just ask a fan of The Walking Dead comic books). In such cases, we’ve tended to map the medium with which we think most readers will be familiar – which (as with The Godfather and The Walking Dead) isn’t always the original medium.

4. These map points are speculation and interpretation, and should not be taken as authoritative.

We’ve been dogged and daring when pinning down some of the locations in this book, taking into account all manner of clues, from the direction of the sun, to footnotes in scripts, to the local flora and fauna of a scene. You might see the same evidence and come to different conclusions. Ultimately, only the creators of the original works can say for sure where they intended a location to be. If any of those creators should happen to be reading this, we welcome your thoughts on our reasoning!

HOW THISBOOK WORKS

Each of our 14 cities comes with its own introduction, setting the scene and teasing out some of the more interesting trends. You’ll also find mini-essays exploring key topics in more detail. Every city has its own demographic fact file, and a chronology giving a year-by-year account of the most important non-happenings (we purposely withheld the names of the source material for this, so you can have fun working them out).

Then come the maps. These are peppered with fictional locations, including the homes of famous characters, fictional streets, parks and neighbourhoods, imagined islands in make-believe bays and so much more. Every point on the map can be found in the index, listed both by grid-referenced location and source. Finally, for each fictropolis we’ve picked out some of the more important or unusual locations to discuss in more detail.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

We’ve drawn on literally thousands of sources in compiling this atlas. Listing every book and website would be impossible – though see the Acknowledgements section for a few particularly helpful resources. A quick note on our research strategies might be of interest, however. Our starting point for each city was to simply pool our own experiences, and revisit all the films, shows, video games and novels we’ve enjoyed for each city. But that only goes so far. The next stage was to mine the internet. Wikipedia, for all its perceived flaws, is an outstanding resource for useful lists. Novels set in Chicago? It’s there. Movies set in Berlin? It’s got hundreds on one page. Such lists have been utterly invaluable in guiding our research. The other great category of resource is fan websites – one of the original mainstays of the early web, and still thriving today. Any popular work of fiction has at least one fan-curated wiki, which offer bewildering levels of detail on characters, settings and film locations.

A NOTE ON SPOILERS

Rest assured 95 per cent of the pins in the maps will be spoiler-free. You won’t glean much plot from knowing which street a character lived on, nor see a big twist coming simply from the name of a café. However, the maps also include a handful of ‘events’ – key moments or quotes from the most famous films and novels. These might reveal plot points at times. However, we’ve limited event markers to only the most celebrated sources. Everyone knows that a giant marshmallow man appears at the end of Ghostbusters, so it hardly seems a spoiler to reveal where it happened.

MAPMAKERS ASSEMBLE!

We hope you enjoy this book, whether using it to discover new shows, films and novels in your city, or in one you plan on visiting. But we also hope it serves as a springboard for your own cartographic adventures. What would the fictropolis of Mumbai look like, or Dublin, or Denver? One can imagine fictional maps by genre, such as the detectives of LA, or the kaiju of Tokyo, drawn up in more detail than we could accomplish here. Smaller towns and cities are also ripe for the treatment. While a comprehensive map of characters from London or LA might be impossible, it could, perhaps, be done for Liverpool, Baton Rouge or Adelaide (for example). This atlas is a modest portal into the boundless multiverse of mappable fiction. Where you go next is up to you.

N ew York, we’d argue, is the capital city of the movieverse. More films are shot and set in LA, for sure, but nowhere quite has the screen presence of the Big Apple. It’s all about the icons. Places like the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, Empire State Building, Central Park and (formerly) the twin towers of the World Trade Centre are recognizable all the world over. What other city can summon so many architectural icons to serve as the ultimate extras?

NYC supersizes everything: the tallest towers; the largest apes; the largest apes up the tallest towers; superheroes everywhere, but usually up tall towers. This city likewise attracts the biggest disasters, from alien invasions to tidal surges to aerial fish attack (Sharknado 2). Giant lizards encroach with a frequency that has Tokyo looking over its shoulder. The 1998 film Armageddon cocks a snook at these trends. When a meteor storm hits New York it is a pavement stall selling Godzilla toys that takes the first hit.

But this is also a city of tightly written human dramas. Think of the mean streets of Martin Scorsese, the awkward comedies of Woody Allen and the shifting factions of countless turf wars – from West Side Story to The Sopranos (NJ, but occasionally NYC), via The Godfather, Gangs of New York and Grand Theft Auto IV. There’s a lighter side to life here, too. New York’s rich comedic heritage is almost unrivalled, accommodating such varied classics as Seinfeld, I Love Lucy, The Odd Couple, Diff’rent Strokes, Taxi, Curb Your Enthusiasm and the brilliant Brooklyn Nine-Nine. All of life is here.

Mapping New York is both a joy and a challenge. As with LA and London, we find so many riches that we could easily fill parts of the map twice over. We’ve plotted what (we hope) are all the places you’d expect to see, while also throwing in a few of the more unusual or obscure locations. Taxi!

CITY FACT FILE

Population:

8.4 million people, numerous trolls, several muppets, a winged serpent, one wascally wabbit and a giant gorilla or three.

Known aliases:

•   The Big Apple (traditional)

•   Liberty City (Grand Theft Auto IV)

•   New New York (Futurama and others)

•   Nuke York City (Rock & Rule)

•   Cinderella City (Manhattan Guardian)

•   Neu-York-Stadt (Wolfenstein).

Notable mayors:

•   Lenny Clotch, 1984 (Ghostbusters)

•   John Pappas, 1996(City Hall)

•   Randall Winston, 1996–2002 (Spin City)

•   Kate Hennings, 2002 (Sweet Home Alabama)

•   J. Jonah Jameson, 2009 (Spider-Man comics)

•   Wilson ‘Kingpin’ Fisk, 2017 (Daredevil comics)

•   C. Randall Poopenmeyer, c.2990 (Futurama).

Notable neighbours:

•   L.B. Jefferies (Rear Window) and the Friends flatmates

•   Peter Venkman (Ghost-busters) and Sam Wheat/Molly Jensen (Ghost)

•   Carrie Bradshaw (Sex and the City) and Holly Golightly (Breakfast at Tiffany’s)

•   Z (Antz) and Barry B. Benson (The Bee Movie).

CAN YOU SHOW ME HOW TO GET TO SESAME STREET?

Why, yes we can. The most famous street in the whole of children’s entertainment is New York through and through. But where to map it? The show’s art director Victor DiNapoli stuck his neck out years ago to say he pictured it on the Upper West Side. The location was confirmed and pinpointed in 2019 when Mayor Bill de Blasio officially renamed a stretch of West 63rd Street as Sesame Street, with many members of cast and crew in attendance. All of this means that Sesame Street is now a real location, and so not technically eligible for our atlas of fictional places. But we took one look into Elmo’s big, trusting eyes and had to slip it in there. Besides, the address of 123 Sesame Street – where Elmo, Bert, Ernie and so many other favourites live – is still fictional (aside from one on Long Island, but that’s another story).

In a weird twist, the semi-fictional street has another famous association. Charles Palantine’s campaign headquarters in Taxi Driver are right on the corner with Broadway, just behind where the sign for Sesame Street now stands tall. This is a key location in the film, where Robert De Niro’s character first creeps all over Cybil Shepherd’s Betsy. So, if you’re ever tempted to jump in a cab and ask ‘Can you show me how to get to Sesame Street?’, just be careful that the driver isn’t called Travis.

RISING ABOVETHE CLOUDS

Skyscrapers might historically have been born in Chicago, but in the fertile soil of New York they took root and flourished. Manhattan’s skyline is a celebrity in itself, featuring some of architecture’s greatest and most iconic accomplishments, both real and imagined.

Among the earliest skyscrapers celebrated in film and media, we see stately edifices like the Flatiron Building (1902) and the Woolworth Building (1913). Although dwarfed by later structures, these famous icons continue to play starring roles in film. The Flatiron, for instance, houses the offices of the Daily Bugle in the Spider-Man films of Sam Raimi, while the Wizarding World of Harry Potter posits the Woolworth Building as the seat of government for MACUSA, the Magical Congress of the United States of America.

It was only with the Art Deco Chrysler and Empire State Buildings of the early 1930s, though, that New York really ‘grew up’. These two titans captured the imagination of the world, and it is around this time that we see comparable structures begin to appear in fiction. Author Faith Baldwin evoked the Chrysler in her fictional Seacoast Building, setting of her 1931 novel Skyscraper, using this new breed of building as a multi-storey stage in which to spin a narrative. The following year’s film adaptation Skyscraper Souls went a step further, transforming Baldwin’s fairly modest Seashore into the megalithic Dwight Building, positioned one block to the east of the Empire State and towering above it with almost contemptuous ease, in an almost farcical show of phallic one-upmanship by the film’s protagonist, tycoon Daniel Dwight.

Notorious ‘Objectivist’ author Ayn Rand drew similar parallels between architecture and masculinity in her novel The Fountainhead, the saga of maverick architect Howard Roark, a man so driven by exacting personal standards that he would rather destroy the buildings he designs than allow his vision to be compromised. The 1949 film adaptation ends with Roark (played by Gary Cooper) standing arms-akimbo atop the framework of his masterpiece, the Wynand Building, while heroine Patricia Neal ascends towards him in awestruck wonder atop a rickety construction elevator. At this moment, Roark becomes the very embodiment of Rand’s philosophy of powerful individuality, standing proud and dominant above Manhattan, riding the throne of what the film proclaims to be ‘The Tallest Building in the World’. This is no small boast, and one the film works hard to uphold – the vista seen as Neal ascends the tower gives us a good estimate of the Wynand’s elevation and location. Dwarfing the distant Empire State Building it stands easily 600m (2,000 ft) high, and rises seemingly from the shores of the Hudson waterfront.

Although unfinished, the architecture of the Wynand Building evokes the clean, Art Deco lines of the 1920s. Futurama, however, opts for a different aesthetic for the tallest building of 31st-century New York. The Vampire State Building is a gloriously gothic throwback of spires, arches and buttresses. Although a clear location is not given, attention to the street layout, backgrounds and position of the setting sun (factoring in that the Earth’s rotation was reversed in an earlier episode) situates the Vampire State way Downtown, near to the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.

Arguably the most fantastical skyscraper of fictional New York, however, blends Art Deco modernism with medieval antiquity. The structure, just south of Central Park, is so massive that fans estimate its footprint covers two whole city blocks. We speak of course of the Eyrie Building, a key setting of Gargoyles, Disney’s 1990s rival to the noirish Saturday-morning charms of Batman: The Animated Series. The Eyrie is indeed a marvel, not only the home and headquarters of mastermind industrialist David Xanatos, but crowned by a 10th-century fortress. This is Castle Wyvern, relocated from rugged Scotland to rise imperiously above the clouds of Manhattan, every detail painstaking restored, right down to the curious stone figures that surmount its gothic battlements ...

WHO YA GONNA CALL?

New York is just crawling with the strange and supernatural. We find immortal gangsters down in Little Italy (Baccano!), undead high-schoolers on Roosevelt Island (Red Garden), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the sewers and trolls aplenty, not just in Central Park but on the Brooklyn and Queensboro bridges, too. Happily, City Hall has set up a branch of local government to keep tabs on the situation. PCOC, the Paranormal Contracts Oversight Commission, operates under the supervision of one Walter Peck, a former apparatchik of the Environmental Protection Agency.

But just who do PCOC turn to when the situation requires more than just oversight? Back in the Roaring Twenties, the obvious answer would have been Chrono Crusade’s Order of Magdalene, a non-denominational religious organization that brought scientific methods and heavy ammunition to the process of exorcism. Although headquartered in Chicago, the Order’s busiest campus is the NYC branch, based out of an expansive monastery on what we believe to be Long Island. Unfortunately, we’ve got no records of their operations post-1929.

There are other paranormal facilitators still in business here and there, private contractors such as Ghost’s Oda Mae Brown, clairvoyant of Franklin Avenue, Brooklyn. Although Oda Mae has a notorious rep as a con artist and fraudster, she was able to resolve the post-mortem troubles of Sam Wheat, a recently departed spirit residing in SoHo. Sam might have found equal help just a few blocks over in Tribeca, however, as it is here in the old Hook and Ladder Eight firehouse that New York’s premier paranormal investigators and eliminators are based. And, much as he despises them, these are the people to whom Walter Peck of PCOC must turn to solve New York’s supernatural shenanigans: the flightsuited boys (and girls) of Ghostbusters Inc.

Quite often those shenanigans involve some gigantic monster tearing up chunks of the city. Take the incident of Gozer the Gozerian, a destructive Sumerian deity who manifested on Earth in 1984, taking the form of foodstuff mascot the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Gozer’s summoning was the end goal of an esoteric interwar cult (which apparently slipped under the Order of Magdalene’s radar). It was led by demented architect and surgeon Dr Ivo Shandor, who at the time resided on a private island in the Hudson (which sank mysteriously when the family line died out). Using his architecture firm as a front, Shandor subtly transformed New York itself into a psychic antenna, centred on 55 Central Park West, a high-rise apartment building crowned with an ornate Babylonian Temple. Thankfully, Messrs Spengler, Stantz, Venkman and Zeddemore of the (Real) Ghostbusters put paid to these schemes, resulting in ectoplasmic gelatine being splattered all over Central Park West. The resulting lawsuits were legendary! Several other Shandor structures form a spooky mandala across the city, if you look carefully through your Ecto-goggles.

Five years after Gozer’s defeat, another malevolent entity showed up in New York, Vigo Von Homburg Deutschendorf, Scourge of Carparthia and Sorrow of Moldavia (1505–1610). At the time a disembodied spirit residing in the canvas of his own self-portrait, Vigo made a bid for world domination on New Year’s Eve of 1989, which the Ghostbusters repelled using Lady Liberty herself to inspire a positive swell of emotion from the people of Manhattan.

A new breed of Ghostbusters saved the city in 2016, based in the upstairs dining room of Zhu’s Authentic Hong Kong Food (on the corner of Mott and Baynard in Chinatown). In their debut, this new team faced a disgruntled genius who drew power from supernatural ley lines running through New York, intersecting at the ominously historied Mercado Hotel on Times Square. Although this attempt was ultimately defeated, it does suggest that, whatever the universe, New York is fundamentally defined as a fulcrum for the supernatural. It all means good business for anyone with a psychic gift ... or an unlicensed nuclear accelerator.

CLOSING THE CIRCLE

Volée Airlines Flight 180 took off from JFK International at 9.25pm on 13 May 2000, bound for Paris. Seconds later the ill-fated 747 exploded, taking the lives of all aboard, along with a patron of ‘Cocktails’, a Long Island bar unlucky enough to be struck by the wrecked plane’s nosewheel.

This is the disaster that opens and closes the Final Destination movie pentalogy, wherein small groups of (un)lucky individuals happen to escape a fatal disaster, only to be picked off one by one as the Grim Reaper comes to repair its damaged designs. And although shot in Canada, portions of the franchise are decisively set within greater New York.

Take ‘Cocktails’, the bar struck by wreckage from Flight 180. It can only lie along a flight path departing east from JFK, close enough to the shoreline for most of the plane’s debris to land in the Atlantic, and nearby to an industrial estate that could house Presage Paper, fictional employer of the cast of Final Destination 5. All these criteria were found in Island Park. Another nearby location is an outlet for French restaurant chain Le Cáfe Miro 81 (see Paris for their flagship restaurant), which is identified in dialogue on a street named ‘Washington’, of which several were to be found in Rockville Center. Within this part of Long Island we’ve also placed fictional Westdale College, setting for one of the most nerve-wracking gymnastic routines ever committed to film.

Our final (ha!) challenge was to anchor the North Bay Bridge, which collapses in spectacular style in the opening minutes of FD5. Shot on Vancouver’s iconic Lions Gate Bridge, this fictional suspension span lies somewhere north of Presage Paper, since the characters are setting off to a corporate retreat in Albany when their charter bus attempts to cross the doomed bridge. Only the East River could suffice.

And with that, we have closed the circle, and deciphered Death’s design ... we hope.

A NEW YORK CHRONOLOGY

1882: At the height of the Gilded Age, robber-baron George Russell moves his family into an opulent new mansion on 5th Avenue, much to the disdain of his old-monied neighbours.

1894: The daughter of the aristocratic Aldridge family murders the entire household staff in their sleep, then the family imprisons her in the base-ment for the rest of her life ...

1933: A giant ape known as Kong breaks his shackles and scales the Empire State Building, before being shot down by fighter planes. Carelessly, similar incidents would occur in 1976 and 2005.

1961: Global Airlines Flight 33 is reported overdue and missing, its course to New York having taken it into ... The Twilight Zone.

1962: In a world where the Axis Powers won the Second World War, the Statue of Liberty is ceremonially demolished as part of a historical purge named Jahr Null (Year Zero). In the spring of the same year, but in a different timeline, the Italian ocean liner Antonia Graza fails to arrive in New York, having vanished without trace in mid-ocean.

1979: A meteor impact gouges a huge trench through central Manhattan.

1982: The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, in the form of a winged lizard, makes a nest in the Art Deco spire of the Chrysler Building. His visit presages further reptilian encroachment in 1998 and 2008.

1984: A gigantic marshmallow man levels several buildings in the Upper West Side.

1985: Millions are left dead after an interdimensional attack strikes at New York. The majority of records attribute this to a giant extra-terrestrial squid, but at least one account linked responsibility to the superhero and nuclear physicist Jonathan Osterman, alias Doctor Manhattan.

1989: It is a very strange New Year’s Eve for the Big Apple, as rivers of pink psychomagnotheric slime ooze through old subway tunnels, the RMS Titanic finally steams into port, and the Statue of Liberty marches across Manhattan.

1997: Air Force One is hijacked and forced down over Manhattan, which has been converted into a massive maximum security prison. A desperate attempt is initiated to rescue the President, who survived the crash.

1998: The city is almost entirely destroyed by a mega-tsunami caused by a meteorite impact. Buildings fall like dominos and the Statue of Liberty is decapitated.

2000: The North Bay Bridge collapses, followed just a few weeks later by the explosion of a Paris-bound 747 over Long Island.

2007: A sentient bee sues the human race in the New York Supreme Court.

2012: Reptilian humanoids called Chitauri mount an aerial attack on New York. A band of heroes known as the Avengers ultimately repel the attack.

2013: Montego Airways Flight 828 vanishes en route to New York. It is presumed to have crashed.

2016: Strange devices placed at strategic points in the city energize ancient ley lines, threatening the integrity of the barrier dividing the worlds of the living and the dead.

2018: Montego Airways Flight 828 attempts to land at JFK, having been missing for over five years. To those onboard, no time at all has passed.

3978: Astronaut-turned-fugitive George Taylor enters the Forbidden Zone and stumbles across the half-buried remains of the Statue of Liberty. He damns everyone to Hell.

THE ALDRIDGE MANSION MUSEUM

Ghostbusters:Answer the Call| MOVIE

Elegant (haunted) home, now an elegant (haunted) museum. The spirit said to stalk the premises is that of Gertrude Aldridge, a disturbed young heiress and murderess. A map in the film places the mansion in the Upper West Side, on the block formed by West 72nd Street, West End Avenue, West 73rd Street and Riverside Drive.

ALGONQUIN

GTA IV| VIDEO GAME

The fourth Grand Theft Auto game is set in Liberty City, a delightfully distorted version of New York City. Algonquin is the name given to the parody of Manhattan, whereas Dukes is Queens and Broker is Brooklyn. The game throws up dozens of alternative names for recognizable parts of town. We’ve only mapped a handful of the more prominent examples, so as not to overwhelm the map with too many names from one source.

ALVY SINGER

Annie Hall| MOVIE

Woody Allen’s character grew up ‘Under a Coney Island rollercoaster’, which we later see in two scenes. The house really existed beneath a previous incarnation of the Thunderbolt ride. The location of Singer’s adult apartment is difficult to pinpoint.

ARCHIE BUNKER

All in the Family and Archie Bunker’s Place| TV

Bunker, a stereotype bigot inspired by Britain’s Alf Garnett, was a hugely popular character in the 1970s and early 1980s. To this day, the phrase ‘an Archie Bunker’ is still used to describe a person with racist or misogynistic views.

Bunker lived at the fictional address of 704 Hauser Street, Queens, but we can easily substitute the exterior filming location on Cooper Avenue. Curiously, the 1994 sitcom 704 Hauser revives the famous address, and depicts a new family moving into the home that Bunker (who does not appear) had by then vacated.

AVENUE Q

Avenue Q| MUSICAL

Located in Brooklyn’s ‘Outer Outer Boroughs’. The main character Princeton says he started at Avenue A (in Manhattan) and worked his way down the price ladder. By counting up from Avenue E (on the west bank of the East River) across into Brooklyn, we reached ‘Q’ on Hewes Street! Ha ha!

BUGS BUNNY

Looney Tunes| TV

Bugs famously speaks with a Brooklyn accent, and in one source identified himself as being from the ‘Back Bay of Brooklyn’. We’ve put his rabbit hole in the most verdant patch of land we could find in the borough.

CARRIE BRADSHAW

Sex and the City| TV

We had a tricky choice to make here. Carrie’s address is well established as 245 East 73rd Street, but the famous steps and other exterior shots were filmed in Perry Street, West Village, a few miles away. The latter has become something of a Mecca for fans of the show, and it feels slightly wrong to ignore it. However, we prefer to map characters to where they supposedly live, rather than where the filming happened to take place, so we’ve gone for 73rd Street. This also puts Carrie a couple of blocks from several other girls-about-town, including Holly Golightly.

CORLEONE FAMILY

The GodfatherBY MARIO PUZO | NOVEL/MOVIE

America’s most famous fictional crime family – at least until the Sopranos came along – live in a sizeable compound in the Long Beach area of Long Island (though the movie exteriors were shot on Staten Island).

THE DOLPHIN HOTEL

1408| MOVIE

In Stephen King’s original short story, the Dolphin is a ‘small but smart’ hotel on 61st Street (around the corner from 5th Avenue). The film adaptation however reimagines it as a Grand Hotel on Lexington Avenue, and we worked out the specific location thanks to a ZIP code seen on prop stationery. The film’s ‘reimagined’ Dolphin might not have the cachet of the Plaza or Carlyle, but manager Gerald Olin still boasts that they operate at 90 per cent capacity year-round. The only fly in the ointment is the series of bizarre deaths that have plagued the Dolphin since it opened in October 1912. There have been 56 such deaths, all occurring within a single room on the 13th floor, a room that the owners prefer to pretend doesn’t exist ...

THE HUXTABLE FAMILY

The Cosby Show| TV

Despite the disgrace of its eponymous star, we’ve decided to include The Cosby Show because of its importance in television history. The show was, by most measures, the biggest sitcom of the 1980s and, in its portrayal of a stable, affluent Black family, broke against the stereotypes then prevalent on American TV. Exterior shots of the family’s home were filmed in Greenwich Village, but their in-universe address was 10 Stigwood Avenue, Brooklyn Heights. No such avenue exists in the area (indeed, there are no avenues at all in Brooklyn Heights), so we’ve mapped it to Willow Street, to maintain the vague ‘wood’ theme.

IRENE REDFIELD

PassingBY NELLA LARSEN | NOVEL/MOVIE

This powerful novel about racial identity takes place largely in Harlem, but see also our Chicago map. While most locations in the book are well pinpointed, the home of central character Irene is not. All we know is that she lives in a brownstone somewhere just off 7th Ave (now Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard) – a very long road. The 2021 movie comes to our rescue in this respect, giving us the filming location of West 137th Street.

JOE GARDNER

Soul| MOVIE

Disney-Pixar’s winning film about a music teacher reluctant to embrace the afterlife plays out across the streets of Queens. Joe’s home is shown to be close to a metro station served by both the 7 train and the M train. The best match is Jackson Heights/Roosevelt Ave.

JOKERTOWN

Wild CardsANTHOLOGIES EDITED BY GEORGE R.R. MARTIN AND MELINDA M. SNODGRASS | NOVELS

The Wild Cards books (30 and counting) chronicle a sprawling shared universe in which an alien virus has wiped out much of humanity, while leaving survivors with bizarre mutations and/or superpowers. More than 40 authors have contributed to the growing canon. Among the more important fictional locations is the Jokertown of Manhattan, an area that collects together some of the more unfortunate and mutilated survivors (known as Jokers). The area, which corresponds roughly to the Bowery, contains its own suite of fictional locations, such as the Blythe Van Rensselaer Memorial Clinic, which researches the ‘Wild Card’ virus. Jokertown has parallels with District X from Marvel Comics and Mutant Town from IDW’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics, both of which are mutant ghettos located in the East Village of Manhattan.

LACUNA, INC.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind| MOVIE

Was there ever a fictional company with a more talented staff pool? Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood and Tom Wilkinson are all employees of Lacuna, Inc., a firm that specializes in erasing unwanted memories. Their clients/victims include Joel and Clementine, two star-crossed lovers played brilliantly by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. Lacuna’s slightly seedy bureau is given an in-universe address of 210 East Grand Street and a ZIP Code of NY 10019. The former does not exist, and the latter would place it somewhere north of Hell’s Kitchen. We fall back on the filming location, which used 504 Grand Street – close enough to the fictional address that we’ll take it. Or should we just forget about the whole thing?

MANHATTAN CONTAINMENT WALL

Escape From New York| MOVIE

In the dystopian future of ... 1988 ... the island of Manhattan has been turned into a maximum security prison. And we mean maximum. The entire landmass is surrounded by a 15m (50 ft) high containment wall to stop hardened criminals from escaping. This proves inconvenient when the President of the USA crash lands within the zone. The route of the wall is helpfully displayed on a computer screen within the film, allowing us to map it with some accuracy.

MISS MINCHIN’S SEMINARY FOR GIRLS

A Little Princess| MOVIE

Located in London in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1905 novel, the 1995 film by Alfonso Cuarón transplants this oppressive girl’s school to Manhattan. Our introduction to the school tracks past a shop that advertises its main entrance as being at 2 Bond Street, so it made sense to locate Miss Minchin’s just around the corner on Lafayette Street.

MOOKIE

Do the Right Thing| MOVIE

The whole film was shot in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area, with Mookie’s house at 173 Stuyvesant Avenue. Wonderfully, part of this road has since been renamed Do The Right Thing Way in tribute to the film.

NEXUS OF THE UNIVERSE

Seinfeld| TV

A popular joke from Seinfeld, which gave this name to the junction of 1st Avenue and 1st Street. Kramer tells Jerry over the phone that he’s on ‘the corner of 1st and 1st – How can a street intersect itself? I must be at the nexus of the universe!’ The gag is one of the most enduring quotes from the show, and people still take photos of the Nexus to this day.

PETER PARKER AND AUNT MAY

Spider-Man| VARIOUS

As many a villain has found, it can be hard to pin down a superhero. Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, is a case in point. The arachnophile hero has been reinvented many times over his 60 years of web-slinging, so locating the home he (usually) shares with Aunt May presents a tangled web indeed. Which version do we pick? Well, in this case we’re going with the original comics, purely because they give a definite address of 20 Ingram Street, Forest Hills. Similarly, Parker’s place of employment at the Daily Bugle could be narrowed to several locations depending which source material we use. Taking the path of least resistance, the Bugle of Tobey Maguire’s Spidey is most easily identified, as it’s clearly based in the Flatiron Building. (In the second and third Maguire films, Peter lives in a crummy flat in the Lower East Side, filmed on Chrystie Street and not mapped here.) If we’re talking the prime Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Peter, then he and May – as established in dialogue – live six blocks from 21st Street station in Queens, a long way from Forest Hills. We’ve also added in the Miles Morales incarnation of Spider-Man, who resides in Brooklyn, close to Wythe Avenue, at least according to Into the Spiderverse.

PHILLIP J. FRY AND BENDER B. RODRÍGUEZ

Futurama| TV

Fry and Bender dwell in the ‘Robot Arms Apts’ high-rise. The episode ‘The Prisoner of Benda’ suggests it is just up 1st Avenue from the UN Building, as Bender (in a stolen body) is chased on foot past the Robot Arms and within seconds arrives at the UN. Other locations from Futurama include the Planet Express building (which according to head writer David X. Cohen is situated at the end of West 57th Street), Madison Cube Gardens and the Head Museum, where the preserved heads of historical greats (and Richard Nixon) bestow their wisdom on the ages. Its location is never stated outright, but an episode where the cast used the assorted heads to travel in time sees them arrive on 68th and Broadway in 1775. Presuming their jaunt was solely in time, not in space, we can thus map the museum with confidence.

PHILLIPS BROADCASTING

The Critic| TV

Formerly ‘Duke Phillips’ House of Chicken and Waffles’, this media empire is such an obvious parody of Turner Broadcasting that we could not help but assign it the same address on Columbus Circle. Next door stands the Duke Phillips Hospital, surmounted by a golden animatronic statue of this Kentucky-fried mogul, that loudly proclaims ‘All Hail Duke! Duke Is Life!’ to passers-by (and passing pigeons).

PIERCE & PIERCE

American PsychoBY BRET EASTON ELLIS;Bonfire of the VanitiesBY TOM WOLFE | NOVELS AND MOVIES

This fictional Wall Street firm has the distinction of appearing in two otherwise unrelated novels (and films), implying the kind of shared universe of which we wholeheartedly approve. Its address as given in American Psycho is 358 Exchange Place.

PLANETARY UNION HQ

The Orville| TV

The universe of Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville leans so heavily on Star Trek that it’s in danger of putting a warp nacelle out of joint. While Trek’s alien worlds are tied together by the United Federation of Planets, the Orville’s denizens are forged into a Planetary Union, whose Headquarters and Assembly are in New York. Establishing shots place the Union’s skyscraper building on the south-east corner of Central Park.

ROSEMARY WOODHOUSE (AND BABY)

Rosemary’s Baby| MOVIE

This superior 1960s horror movie was largely filmed in LA, but is set in New York. The titular character(s) live in a creepy apartment block on the Upper West Side, known as The Bramford. In the real world, the building is a local landmark called the Dakota (famous as the site of John Lennon’s murder). The Dakota is a rare triple point on our map. Rosemary’s notional neighbours include David Aames (Tom Cruise’s character in Vanilla Sky) and Lana Kane of Archer fame. Now that would make for an unusual dinner party.

SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER

The Producers| MOVIE

Two theatre producers put on an intentional flop as part of a fraudulent share scheme. And what could be a bigger flop than a production literally singing the praises of Hitler? Unfortunately for them, the show is construed as a satirical masterpiece. Springtime for Hitler, complete with goose-stepping chorus line, is shown to be staged at the now-demolished Playhouse Theatre on 48th Street. It’s not the only fictional Broadway production to appear on the map. Look out too for Lease: The Musical, which is Team America’s parody of Rent, and, of course, King Kong: The Eighth Wonder of the World, who escaped his bounds from the fictional Alhambra Theatre on Times Square in the 2005 film. Cry Havoc, a comedy play from the same movie, is also staged nearby at the (equally fictitious) East Side Theatre.

STARK TOWER

MCU| VARIOUS

Later known as the Avengers Tower, this distinctive skyscraper’s location is easily pinpointed from the many aerial views. Look carefully at the visual effects and you’ll notice that Tony’s futuristic tower is grafted onto the base of the real-world MetLife Building.

STERLING ARCHER

Archer| TV

The most dangerous agent of intelligence agency ISIS has no canonical address; however, the view from his luxury condo gives us a key clue. Archer has a clear line of sight towards 200 Liberty Street (with its distinctive truncated pyramid rooftop) but not the adjacent World Trade Center, a view only possible from the north-east. This implies Archer resides near City Hall, possibly in Tower 270 on Broadway. This building was the original headquarters of the Manhattan Project, which seemed just the perfect home for the lead character of a show satirizing the secret world of spycraft. Lana Kane (Archer’s on-again-off-again lover and fellow ISIS agent) lives in the Upper West Side at the real Dakota Apartments (see Rosemary Woodhouse, above). In lieu of an official address, we’ve chosen to map ISIS headquarters halfway between Archer and Lana’s residences, on the Avenue of the Americas.

TENENBAUM FAMILY

The Royal Tenenbaums| MOVIE

Wes Anderson’s characteristically offbeat movie plays fast and loose with New York; the many fictional locations and sets are as idiosyncratic as the characters. At the heart of the film is the lofty Tenenbaum house, which is immediately established as being at ‘111 Archer Avenue’. The address is fictional, so we’re using the shooting location of Convent Avenue (at 144th Street). The family’s summer retreat, meanwhile, is supposedly on ‘Eagle’s Island’. No such place exists, but the film location of City Island is a natural match. The Lindbergh Palace Hotel, from which Royal is evicted after 22 years, is also a fiction, as is its address of 2100 North 30th Avenue. The only 30th Avenue in NYC is in Queens and it’s a road without grand hotels. We’ve plumped for the filming location of the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue (right beside the ‘Sedgewick Hotel’, site of the Ghostbusters’ first bust). Finally, Maddox Hill Cemetery, where assorted Tenenbaums find their final resting place, is a rebadged Trinity Church Cemetery. The impressive tomb to ‘Nicholas Lundy’ is a fake – Lundy was the film’s Production Designer.

TONY AND CARMELA SOPRANO

The Sopranos| TV

Such is the stature of this Noughties Mafia drama that we made sure the map stretched far enough into Jersey to include the protagonist. Tony’s address is never stated in the show (though we know from the prequel film that he grew up in Newark), so we have to rely on the filming location – a des-res in North Caldwell, that went on sale for $3.4 million back in 2019. Similarly, we’ve had to use filming locations for most of the Sopranos inclusions, in lieu of any further clues. The exceptions are Junior Soprano, whose address is given as Watsessing Avenue, Belleville, and the Nuovo Vesuvio restaurant, filmed on Long Island, but supposedly in Newark, towards Bloomfield.

THE TOW’R MACTRUMP

MacTrumpBY IAN DOESCHER AND JACOPO DELLA QUERCIA | BOOK

This clear analogue of Trump Tower is Lord MacTrump’s residence in good New Yorktown, and the lynchpin of his business empire. But dark deeds may have taken place at the Tow’r, for there are rumours of a secret meeting therein with men of Moskvà, representatives of Czar Vlad Putain ...

WHERE HARRY MET SALLY

When Harry Met Sally| MOVIE

A bit of a cheat, as the café with the famous fake orgasm scene is not fictional. It’s such an iconic moment in New York film history, though, that you’d be disappointed if we hadn’t included it. Katz’s Delicatessen at 205 East Huston Street boasts both a storied history and long queues. If you want to find the spot for yourself, it’s erogenously close to Seinfeld’s Nexus of the Universe (see above).

WILLIAM CUTTING

Gangs of New York| MOVIE

Gangs of New York is also a tricky one to include in a fictional atlas. While the movie might watch like a bombastic work of fiction, much of the set-up is based on actual events. All the gang names and riots are real, and even Daniel Day Lewis’s bellicose character of William Cutting leans heavily on noted thug William Poole. The name change is just about enough for us to include him, with his base adjacent to the woefully misnamed Paradise Square in the Five Points area, just like his real-life prototype.

Of all the cities in this atlas, LA proved the most fun – and the most challenging – to compile. Fun because this is the city where everything happens. The cameras of Hollywood often spill out beyond the studios onto the streets, hills and beaches of LA, offering a near-endless supply of characters and locations we might ensnare for our map.

But we have to be careful. Many, many movies and TV shows are filmed in LA but set elsewhere. Why go to the expense of flying your film unit out to New York, or Chicago, or Berlin, or Mars when you can recreate your setting on the streets (or deserts) of LA so close to home? NYPD Blue, Mad Men and Friends are just three examples of shows set in the Big Apple but mostly filmed in LA. Given our Prime Directive of mapping the locations where stories are supposed to be set, and not necessarily where they were filmed, a surprising amount of source material is ruled out.

CITY FACT FILE

Population:

12,488,000 humans, superheroes, video game sprites and animated ‘toons’.

Known aliases:

•   City of Angels, Tinseltown, The Big Orange, La-La Land (all traditional)

•   Los Santos (GTA5)

•   San Angeles (with San Diego and Santa Barbara; Demolition Man)

•   Starlight Shores (The Sims 3)

•   Angel Grove (Power Rangers)

Notable mayors:

•   2010: Ramon Quintero (The Closer)

•   2021: Neil Bremer (Mr Mayor).

Notable neighbours:

•   Tony Stark (Iron Man), Miles Dyson (Terminator 2) and Tony Vivaldi (The Last Action Hero)

•   Angus MacGyver and Quincy, M.E.

•    John Connor (TheTerminator) and Daniel LaRusso (The Karate Kid).

We’re not left short, though. Los Angeles provides the full gamut of cinematic experience, from the warm hearted toe-tapping of La La Land to the sweeping dystopia of the Blade Runner films. Certain parts of the maps are particularly intense. For some unfathomable reason, everybody wants to live in Bel Air. The Colbys rub shoulder pads with The Godfather’s Jack Woltz, along with Get Shorty’s Martin Weir, Rachel Marron (and her Bodyguard), the ‘Big’ Lebowski (not to be confused with ‘The Dude’ Lebowski who lives down in Venice), and a wealth of other characters – wealth being the operative word.

The Dude, meanwhile, abides with a crowd of other well-known faces. Jerry Maguire, Mitch from Baywatch, Quincy, MacGyver ... all enjoy beachside living between Santa Monica and Venice. They should watch out, though. This is ground zero for Battle: Los Angeles, when marines set up a defensive line along Lincoln Avenue to fight off hostile aliens. ‘This aggression will not stand, man.’ Had the aliens waited another decade to invade, they might have been stopped at the great Sepulveda Sea Wall, which forms such a notable barrier across our wider LA map. The wall comes from Blade Runner 2049, and is seen in the climactic battle between Luv and K.

Ultimately, space hasn’t allowed us to map everything we would like in Los Angeles. You have our permission to doodle in the margins if you want to try and fit in yet more characters.

WHO MAPPED ROGER RABBIT?

‘News In Brief. California, 1947. Cloverleaf Industries were on a roll this week, acquiring two Hollywood institutions: the Pacific Red Car trolley line, and the celebrated Maroon Cartoon Studios, in one of the biggest real estate deals ever in California history. Three-and-a-half million dollars for a laugh factory, and that’s no joke!’

That pithy bit of newsreel blows open the sinister scheme at the heart of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a fantastical flick where humans and animated ’toons live side-by-side. Cloverleaf Industries, a shady conglomerate fronting for the diabolical Judge Doom, have been purchasing businesses and properties across Los Angeles to benefit off a planned freeway, one people will be forced to use thanks to Cloverleaf’s acquisition and closure of the city’s public transport trolley network, the Red Car.

And if all this sounds insane, it’s just a slightly loonier version of a real-world scandal, where National City Lines, a consortium backed by General Motors, purchased and dismantled numerous trolleycar systems across America, replacing them with General Motors buses! Among those victims were the real Red Cars, the Pacific Electric Railway. Now you know!

The keystone – both to Doom’s ‘Cloverleaf Scenario’ and the fictional geography of the movie – is Toontown, a ’toon enclave which will be erased in order to build a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food, tyre salons, automobile dealerships, and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. (‘My God, it will be beautiful’.) Toontown itself neighbours the factory of murdered magnate Marvin Acme and the Maroon Cartoon Studios, both of which are shown early in the film to stand on Sunset Boulevard.

Doom describes the planned freeway as reaching ‘from here to Pasadena’, which identifies it as the real-world Arroyo Seco Parkway (part of California 110). This clue also situates Toontown squarely at the southern end of the road. Earlier drafts of the script go a step further by stating Toontown will be demolished to build a massive cloverleaf interchange, something that sounds awfully akin to the real Bill Keene Memorial Interchange.

Thus, it all falls into place. Toontown is bordered to the east by the 110, and to the west by Sunset Boulevard. If you live in the vicinity of Everett Park or just south of Dodger Stadium, consider yourself an honorary ’toon!

Other locations from Roger Rabbit also map to real landmarks. Slightly hard-boiled private eye Eddie Valiant lives Downtown, opposite the old Pacific Electric Subway Terminal on South Hill Street (don’t ask us how he can see the Hollywood Sign from his window!). Up in Hollywood proper we find the Ink and Paint Club, a ‘Toon Revue’ nightclub where Roger’s bombshell wife Jessica performs (and where Donald and Daffy Duck provide a mean duet!). We’re never given an address, but the club lies across the street from an establishment whose neon sign ends in ‘nk’, and which announces itself to be ‘Best in Hollywood Since 1919’ – working backwards, this would appear to be the ‘Musso & Frank’ Grill, Hollywood’s oldest restaurant, located at 6667 Hollywood Boulevard. And yes, it opened in 1919.

MR BEAN GOES TO HAUNTED HILL

In the same year that a volcano erupted on Wilshire Boulevard, an even greater disaster landed at LAX. This would be, of course, Mr Bean, in his first cinematic outing. A hapless employee of London’s National Gallery, Bean’s superiors are so desperate to get rid of him that they fob him off as an art expert and send him on a three-month sabbatical to Los Angeles, there to represent them at the Grierson Gallery’s unveiling of its latest acquisition, Whistler’s Mother. ‘Our Loss, is America’s Gain.’

This proved quite fun to map. The Grierson Gallery itself is fictional, and the exterior is actually a mansion in Malibu, forced perspective being used to make it seem huge. Conceptually, the gallery is a match for the Getty Center. Both are art museums with hilltop locations and eccentric architecture. Since the Getty already has a specific fictional analogue on our map (GTA’s Kortz Center), we thought it fun to map the Grierson just one hill over, suggesting a rivalry between the two establishments.

Meanwhile, the home of ‘Dr Bean’s’ unlucky hosts, the Langley family, was filmed at 16571 Chattanooga Place in the Pacific Palisades, though the house number seen in the film is 1150, allowing us to fudge the location a little. Curiously, this put the questionably sane Bean within spitting distance of an infamous facility, the Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane, perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. We don’t recommend Beanie paying it a visit, however. Once a celebrated hospital, the Institute was gutted by fire during a patient riot in 1931, immolating almost all inside. Horrified investigators subsequently discovered the facility’s sterling reputation concealed a nightmarish truth, that director and surgeon Dr Richard B. Vannacutt had been performing sadistic experiments on his own patients. The building itself has since been restored to original condition, but who would dare move into what is now known as the House on Haunted Hill?

We actually had to tweak the coastline to incorporate a location for the Vannacutt Institute, setting for the 1999 remake of Director William Castle’s original House on Haunted Hill of 1959. This allowed us to incorporate another location, the city of Mariner Bay from Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue