Yesterday, I was on a blog post at Silver Screen Modes titled “A Virtual Tour of the old M-G-M back lot” (see link below) which contains a bunch of photos of MGM that I’ve never seen before. It’s worth checking out but this one in particular caught my eye. It’s a shot of one of the New York street sets (they had 7 of them: Brownstone St, Eastside St, Warehouse Alley, Church Street, Fifth Ave, Cullem St, and Park Ave) on Lot 2. (Lot 1 is where the soundstages and various departments were housed.) The scaffolding on top can be used for lighting or blacking out for night scenes. And notice there are lots of corners which gave directors a lot of choice of camera angles, and led the audience believe the rest of New York lay just out of sight, which it did—in our imaginations.

Here is a map of MGM ten-acre Lot 2. (Click the image for a larger view.)