May 28, 2018 History, Photo Essay

Amid Jane Freeman’s cache of photos from the 1980s and 90s—the most recent installment is here—was a thorough look at the set built at the northwest corner of W. Broadway and N. Moore for It Could Happen to You. Shot in 1993 and released in 1994, the film is about a cop (Nicolas Cage) who splits his winning lottery ticket with a diner waitress (Bridget Fonda, whom I’d like to see more of these days). “There are 400 coffee shops in Lower Manhattan, but none of them satisfied TriStar Pictures, so they’re building the set on this lot, which I always have used as a short cut despite the ubiquity of rats,” wrote Freeman in her journal (excerpted here). “The diner they’re building—the Ideal Coffee Shop—looks like it’s been there for a century; it has the right sinking-in-the-pavement look; and how well they fake weathered wood and old grime. The ‘brick’ is just painted fiberglass; the walls are plywood; the ‘stone’ sills are made of wood. Bogus tin ceilings. Everything fake, yet realer than real. The fact that it’s make-believe is what’s so interesting—a really giant miniature, and I’m already mourning the day the set will be struck, its existence sacrificed to celluloid.”

The set designers also constructed the four-story loft building to the north, along with a newsstand and a ghost sign. And in the third photo below, note what the Atalanta building at 25 N. Moore looked like before its windows were (re-?)added.