Talk:Vertigo (film)/list of locations

Filming locations
Filmed from September to December 1957, Vertigo uses location footage of the San Francisco Bay Area, with its steep hills and tall, arching bridges. In the driving scenes shot in the city, the main characters' cars are almost always pictured heading down the city's steeply inclined streets. In October 1996, the restored print of Vertigo debuted at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco with a live on-stage introduction by surviving cast member Kim Novak, providing the city a chance to celebrate itself. Visiting the San Francisco film locations has something of a cult following as well as modest tourist appeal. Such a tour is featured in a subsection of Chris Marker's documentary montage Sans Soleil.

In March 1997, the cultural French magazine Les Inrockuptibles published a special issue titled Vertigo's about the film locations in San Francisco, Dans le décor, which lists and describes all actual locations.

Areas that were shot on location (not recreated in a studio):


 * Scottie's apartment (900 Lombard Street) is one block downhill from the "crookedest street in the world". Although the door has been repainted, the entrance is easily recognizable save for a few small changes to the patio. The doorbell and the mailbox, which Madeleine uses to deliver a note to Scottie, are exactly the same as they were in the film.
 * The Mission San Juan Bautista, where Madeleine falls from the tower, is a real place, but the tower had to be matted in with a painting using studio effects; Hitchcock had first visited the mission before the tower was torn down due to dry rot, and was reportedly displeased to find it missing when he returned to film his scenes. The original tower was much smaller and less dramatic than the film's version.
 * The Carlotta Valdes headstone featured in the film (created by the props department) was left at Mission Dolores. Eventually, the headstone was removed as the mission considered it disrespectful to the dead to house a tourist attraction grave for a fictional person. All other cemeteries in San Francisco were evicted from city limits in 1912, so the screenwriters had no other option but to locate the grave at Mission Dolores.
 * Madeleine jumps into the sea at Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
 * The gallery where Carlotta's painting appears is the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The Carlotta Valdes portrait was lost after being removed from the gallery, but many of the other paintings in the background of the portrait scenes are still on view.
 * Muir Woods National Monument is represented by Big Basin Redwoods State Park; however, the cutaway of the redwood tree showing its age is a replica of one that can still be found at Muir Woods.
 * The coastal region where Scottie and Madeleine first kiss is Cypress Point, a location along the 17 Mile Drive near Pebble Beach. However, the lone tree by which they kiss is a prop brought specially to the location.
 * The domed building past which Scottie and Judy walk is the Palace of Fine Arts.
 * Coit Tower appears in many background shots; Hitchcock once said that he included it as a phallic symbol. Also prominent in the background is the tower of the San Francisco Ferry Building.
 * The exterior of the sanatorium where Scottie is treated was a real sanatorium, St. Joseph's Hospital, located at 355 Buena Vista East, across from Buena Vista Park. The complex has been converted into condominiums and the building, built in 1928, is on the National Register of Historic Places.
 * Gavin and Madeleine's apartment building is "The Brocklebank" at 1000 Mason Street on Nob Hill, which still looks essentially the same. It is across the street from the Fairmont Hotel, where Hitchcock usually stayed when he visited and where many of the cast and crew stayed during filming. Shots of the surrounding neighborhood feature the Flood Mansion and Grace Cathedral. Barely visible is the Mark Hopkins hotel, mentioned in an early scene in the movie.
 * The "McKittrick Hotel" was a privately owned Victorian mansion from the 1880s at Gough and Eddy Streets. It was torn down in 1959 and is now an athletic practice field for Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory School. The St. Paulus Lutheran Church, seen across from the mansion, was destroyed in a fire years later.
 * Podesta Baldocchi is the flower shop Madeleine visits as she is being followed by Scottie. The shop's location at the time of filming was 224 Grant Avenue. The Podesta Baldocchi flower shop now does business from a location at 410 Harriet Street.
 * The Empire Hotel is a real place, called the York Hotel, and now (as of January 2009) the Hotel Vertigo at 940 Sutter Street. Judy's room was created, but the green neon of the "Hotel Empire" sign outside is based on the actual hotel's sign (it was replaced when the hotel was renamed).
 * Ernie's Restaurant (847 Montgomery St.) was a real place in North Beach, not far from Scottie's apartment. It is no longer operating.
 * One short scene shows Union Square at dawn, with old-fashioned "semaphore" traffic lights. Pop Leibl's bookstore, the Argosy, was not a real location, but one recreated on the Paramount lot in imitation of the real-life Argonaut Book Store, which still exists near Sutter and Jones.
 * One confusing difference from the movie and current San Francisco neighborhood designation is Elster's Mission District Shipping Company (the Mission being described as "Skid Row"). The Mission district of today is actually inland, and the designation of a Mission Bay neighborhood only occurred in the 1980s; today, the area including Mission Bay is referred to as South of Market (SoMA) At the time the designation Inner Mission or "South of the Slot" applied to the waterfront including its working piers located to the south of Market Street, encompassing today's Mission Bay and South Beach. In the 1950's the area south of Market was indeed skid row which is why it was torn down by redevelopment in the 1960s clearing the way for all the new shiny high-rises of today.