West Side Story's Opening Scenes Were Filmed in San Juan Hill, Now the Site of Lincoln

The set was a real block, already marked for clearance

West Side Story opens with the Jets and the Sharks moving through playgrounds, tenements and vacant lots. Those opening shots were not built on a Hollywood backlot. They were filmed in San Juan Hill, a real Upper West Side neighborhood that had already been marked for demolition when the cameras arrived. Shortly after filming, the area was razed for the construction of Lincoln CenterLincoln CenterThe Upper West Side campus housing the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet and Juilliard..

San Juan Hill had been one of the city's most important Black and Afro-Caribbean cultural districts, with jazz clubs, churches and a dense mix of renters and small businesses. The urban renewal project led by Robert Moses displaced more than 7,000 families and around 800 businesses. The film's first minutes are, in effect, a moving record of blocks that no longer exist.

An accidental record of a neighborhood

The prologue's long tracking shots read today as documentation as much as choreography: stoops, fire escapes, empty lots and the street grid of the blocks between roughly West 59th and West 65th Streets, west of Amsterdam Avenue. What the film does not show is who lived there. San Juan Hill was a Black and Afro-Caribbean community, the screen version of the West Side is a story of rival white ethnic gangs. No location is named in the credits, which is part of why the neighborhood's role in the film is so easy to miss.

Lincoln Center's campus, including the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, rose on the cleared land over the following years. The cultural district that had grown in San Juan Hill found no equivalent on the new campus, and the neighborhood's name survives mainly in histories of the Upper West Side.

Seeing the ground on foot

The Lincoln Center plaza at Broadway and West 63rd Street is the simplest place to start. The fountain, the opera house and the concert halls stand on what were residential blocks. The plaza is free and open daily, and guided campus tours run on select days, check Lincoln Center's official page for current times. Walk west to Amsterdam Avenue and north past West 65th Street to trace the approximate edges of San Juan Hill. For the demolition's paper trail, the New York Public Library's local history collections and city Landmarks Preservation Commission records are the places to look. IMDb's page for the 1961 film is a quick reference for the prologue's locations.

For the performance half of the story, Broadway shows in New York run a short subway ride south. A few blocks east, Central ParkCentral ParkThe 843-acre engineered wilderness at Manhattan's heart, designed by Olmsted and Vaux in 1858. and MoMAMuseum of Modern ArtThe Midtown museum holding Starry Night, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and the definitive modern art collection. fill out an afternoon on foot.

Programming on the campus runs most evenings in season, so curtain time shows the site in its current role rather than its former one. A guided theater-district walking tour pairs the Broadway houses with the blocks around Lincoln Center, tracing how a performing-arts campus replaced a residential neighborhood, from $35 (estimated). Traveler reviews on the activity page are worth reading before choosing a departure time.

More on the place itself: broadway show.