The
phenomenally successful con movie is set in thirties
Chicago, but many
of the period locations were found around LA.
In fact, much of the film was shot at Universal
in Hollywood, on
the backlotís all-purpose ‘Main Street’. Paul Newman’s
carousel is the 1916 Looff
Carousel, still in action, on the Santa
Monica Pier, at the end of Colorado
Avenue, Santa Monica. Some tricky artwork
turns the pier itself into Chicagoís
‘el’, the elevated railway.
The pier is also seen in Inside
Daisy Clover, The
Net and Bean.
The Chicago ‘el’
seen in the movie is on the Universal backlot, where
it was built for Norman
Jewisonís period comedy Gaily
Gaily.
Several real bars served as sets: the plush ‘New York’
gambling casino is a lounge of the Castle
Green Apartments, 99 South Raymond Avenue, Pasadena
(www.castlegreen.com). A venerable old LA
hotel, the Castle Green was drafted into service when the set-building budget
began to run low. It was also used for corridors of
the ‘Chicago’ hotel. You can also see the apartments
in The Man With Two Brains,
as the piano teacherís studio in the Coensí The
Man Who Wasnít There
and The Last Samurai,
and the building’s bizarre Moorish exterior in Bugsy.
The bank is the Italian marble lobby of the 1912, seven-storey
Commercial and Savings Bank,
Pasadena. Nearby is the ‘Chicago’ alleyway.
The FBI hideout is the old Koppel Plant, a storage building
for grain shipments in the San
Pedro harbor district. The burlesque theatre
is the old Phantom of the Opera
set at Universal Studios,
in Hollywood.
The railway terminals of Joliet, Chicago and New York
are all Chicago,
though. Two of the railway terminals were no longer
in use and had been converted into office space, which
meant that renovations had to be stripped away and old
ticket offices restored. The termini are Union
Station (still in use); La
Salle Street Station (still in use, but the
period exterior seen in the movie has since gone); Penn
Central Freight Yards and Illinois
Central Station.
The limp 1983 sequel, imaginatively titled Sting
2, used the Santa
Cruz Boardwalk, 400 Beach Street, Santa Cruz,
on the coast south of San
Francisco (see Killer
Klowns from Outer Space).
