Q.What was the first movie shot on location in New York City?

A. While Thomas A. Edison’s Kinetoscopes had been introduced in Manhattan in 1894, those films, which ran on a loop, were enclosed in a wooden cabinet and viewed only through an eyepiece.

The first film shot on location that was made to be projected on a screen was probably “Herald Square,” which was shot on May 11, 1896, by an Edison assistant, William Heise. He used a new camera that had been designed by Edison for shooting outdoor scenes, according to “Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies,” by James Sanders (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). Just three weeks earlier, America’s first projected motion pictures were being shown near Herald Square in Koster & Bial’s Music Hall on 34th Street, where Macy’s now sits.

“Looking out at the bright spring scene, he could see the energetic heart of a great city, bursting with life,” Mr. Sanders wrote of Mr. Heise. “Well-dressed pedestrians mingled with the surging traffic along 34th Street. The elevated train roared periodically along tracks above Sixth Avenue.”

These documentary films, just a minute or two long, were called actualities; they had no plots, stories or characters. They were soon supplanted by story films, Mr. Sanders wrote, especially chase scenes with police officers and criminals.