The Corner Penthouse

This is an article 25 years in the making, and one that is extra special to me.

You see, what I'm going to write about today was my very first filming location identification. I had a friend in high school named Kevin Gondek who was a big train enthusiast. We studied this scene in the early 1990s on VHS and determined which two stations were used. I don't remember how we made the determination. Most likely, it was Kevin who figured it out.

After 25 years, I finally visited the two train stations on Fri. July 17, 2015 and took photographs to match as many of the movie shots as I felt was necessary. So, with all of that backstory out of the way, let's get right to it. Please note, this article has almost 30 images in it, so there may be a little bit of load time.

The first five minutes (mirror) of the 1988 movie Married To The Mob features a mob hit on a commuter train. Two Long Island Rail Road train stations are used to piece this scene together: Cedarhurst and Valley Stream. In fact, if you look closely, you can even see a "Cedarhurst" sign in one shot. It's *barely* visible on DVD (probably a lot clearer on Blu-ray), so there's no way Kevin and I would have been able to read it on VHS.


The Cedarhurst station is on the Far Rockaway line, which branches off at Valley Stream. Remember this detail, as it will be important later to show how impossible it is to take the trip seen in the movie.


The movie opens with all of its credits placed atop various close-ups of train tracks and equipment. Some of these shots I know are at Cedarhurst, like a shot of commuters standing on a platform looking down the tracks. The close-ups of the gates and lights, I'm sure, are also at Cedarhurst, but I didn't think these shots were necessary for this article. Also, some of the elevated train track shots were, likely, done in Brooklyn. Most of the shots shown under the credits are too generic to be identified as anywhere in particular, and are likely in a stock footage library by now.

One shot from that credits sequence that was filmed at Cedarhurst shows a man pushing a shopping cart across the train tracks. This is one block away from the Cedarhurst train station, with the man walking on Linwood Avenue, going South to Chestnut Street. The camera crew was positioned next to the tracks in the same spot they were in when they filmed a later side shot of the tracks. The camera was pointed up the line towards Valley Stream.


That spot looks pretty much the same today. All of those utility poles on the left and right are there, though the foliage is a tad different.


Continuing with shots in the order they're seen in the movie, we have this shot of commuters standing on the platform on the Far Rockaway side.


I wasn't paying as much attention as I thought I was, because my replication of that shot isn't quite in the right place (though I was standing in the right spot). I should have moved my camera over to the left, so that the station house (the building with the green roof on the left) would be on the right of my photograph. I only noticed it now, after the fact, that that building is seen (barely, behind the commuters) on the right of the movie shot.

Anyway, as you can see, the same lights are there, but the L.I.R.R. has added a red safety bumper and some "Watch The Gap" caution signage to the edges of the platform.


Now we, finally, get a great shot of the Cedarhurst station and the buildings behind it on Chestnut Street.


This was an annoying shot to try to replicate because I didn't have the luxury of sitting atop a crane in the parking lot, as the film crew did. From ground level, there are too many things in the way to see everything you see in the movie, but thanks to the distinctive top of that building in the center, it's easy to see that it's the same place. Al Steiner's no longer occupies that building, and the facade has been redone (the name "Equishares" is embedded into the top part where that tiny window used to be). Everything else is just about the same.


As the final credit fades away, the camera pans across all of the commuters and rests upon our stars, Alec Baldwin and Paul Lazar. Again, everyone is standing on the platform on the Far Rockaway side.


I am *SO* damn happy that I was able to nail the *exact* spot where they were standing. You'll notice that everything matches: platform column, platform seam, billboards (the third one was removed), the winged overhead lights in the parking lot, the light fixture on the platform, and even the brown wooden utility pole in the background directly in the middle of the shot. Boy, did the trees grow a lot in the 27 years since Jonathan Demme and his crew were there :-)


For fun, I was able to identify the two posters seen in the movie shot. The one on the left is for Jackie Mason's one-man Broadway show The World According To Me. The quote at the top says, "Jackie Is A Winner, According To Everyone". I could not track down the exact poster used, but it's very similar to the one seen below, which comes courtesy of Goldin Auctions. The poster on the right is from the off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors, and I was able to find the exact poster, courtesy of Posters 'N Things. (Thanks to Matthew Jordan for fixing the Little Shop poster image.)


The target drives his car across the tracks on Cedarhurst Avenue.


The blue building is still there and looks the same, except there's a new business on the first floor, who added a maroon awning.


He drives across the tracks and stops in front of the Cedarhurst Village Hall.


If you try to replicate that *exact* shot today, you get this:


Yeah, they planted a tree right where there wasn't one 27 years ago. So, I moved down the platform a little bit to get the closest approximation of the shot possible today. The building looks the same, except they added a bunch of bushes to cover up the wheelchair ramp that runs along the right side.


The train arrives, coming down the tracks FROM Valley Stream heading TO Far Rockaway.


In my efforts to replicate the movie shots as best as possible, I actually waited around for a train to come, so I could take the photograph with a train in it at the spot seen. On this line, the trains come once an hour, so I'm glad that I was able to get it on the first take. Notice that the overhead wire running to the pole on the right is *exactly* the same. It meets up with the pole in such a strange manner. The second pole is still there, but so much foliage has been added that you can no longer seen those pink-roofed buildings in the far distance. Also, that large tree past the platform on the left has been removed.


The train pulls up to the station, and everyone gets on, leaving this nice "empty" location shot.


The train that pulled up when I was there didn't stop at the same spot, so I was lucky to get a near-perfect shot as it was still moving, again on the first take :-)


As the train leaves, we get this side shot of the tracks. Now this is where the movie starts to fall apart with real life. The train comes in going TO Far Rockaway, but this shot shows it leaving on the *other* tracks going TO Valley Stream. The cameraman was sitting on a concrete slab next to some electrical boxes by the side of the track just across the station, on the side of the street with that blue building. If the camera moved over to the right a little bit, you would have seen the village hall on the other side of the fence. The camera was in this spot, but turned 180 degrees, to get that shot of the guy pushing the shopping cart across the tracks.


Today, the shot looks a little different thanks to the removal of that large tree and all of that foliage.


The hit is performed while going through a tunnel that doesn't exist on the line in real life. That tunnel is the Atlantic Avenue viaduct in East New York and Flatbush, according to the folks at SubChat.com and Railroad.net. Since I'm not covering that one Brooklyn shot, let's look at the inside of the train. Those same folks tell us that the M1 model is the type of train seen in the movie.


I don't know if the L.I.R.R. still uses M1 cars, but the M3 car (I think that's what it is) that I was in looks somewhat similar.


After making the hit, Frank (Alec Baldwin) and Tommy (Paul Lazar) get off at the elevated Valley Stream train station.


After they walk off screen, we get a good look at the station, specifically the elevator housing.


It generally looks the same today, except the white is gone, a roof has been added, the red supports have been painted brown, the lamp has been replaced with a different one, and a second lamp and billboards have been added.


Here's what the elevator housing looks like from the side, courtesy of the view from my kitchen window.


Now, if you've been playing along at home, you will have noticed the many mistakes with this scene in relation to real life. To recap...

Frank de Marco (Alec Baldwin) and Tommy Boyle (Paul Lazar) get on at the Long Island Railroad's Cedarhurst station (on the Far Rockaway branch). We know this for a fact because we can see a "Cedarhurst" sign on the platform in one shot. They board a train headed towards Far Rockaway, but the train leaves in the opposite direction on different tracks. They perform a hit on The Fat Man (Captain Haggerty) while the train goes through a tunnel, and then get off at the Valley Stream station. There are no tunnels between the Cedarhurst and Valley Stream stations. The tunnel seen is actually in Brooklyn, quite far away from either station.

Got all that?

Full-size copies of all images used in this article, and some alternates, can be found on my Facebook page. Also, you can take a virtual walk around the Cedarhurst train station via Google Maps Street View.

For this article, I used the fullscreen copy of the movie from the original MGM DVD released in 2000. Fullscreen is preferred as it opens the mattes and shows more at the top and bottom. Widescreen chops off the top and bottom (some opening credit text is actually cut off) and adds nothing to the sides. Should you wish to purchase the movie, here are the three known U.S. releases: MGM 2000 DVD (Wide/Full), Kino Lober 2014 DVD (Wide only?), and Blu-Ray (Wide only).


For more information about non-Ghostbusters filming locations, be sure to check out the rest of this site/blog's Shot On Site articles. For Ghostbusters filming locations, check out Spook Central's Filming Locations page (Shot on Site articles are linked off the individual pages).