NEIGHBORHOOD TIME-TRAVELING, PT. 3: "DECOY" (SEASON 1, EPISODE 3)

Long before Angie Dickinson starred in Police Woman, Beverly Garland had the title role in Decoy.  Not as a wooden carving of a duck, but undercover police detective Casey Jones, forever putting her life in jeopardy for the citizens of New York.  Like Naked City, it was shot on location and featured many up-and-coming actors in some of their earliest TV roles.

A 1957 episode, entitled "The Phoner", has Det. Jones trying to find the lowlife making obscene, threatening phone calls to a young woman. Today, the guy would be asking for her credit card number to get rid of an alleged virus on her laptop.

At the beginning of the scene, Jones and the victim are exiting the latter's apartment building.

Unlike most of the scenes in Decoy  and Naked City, this appeared to be on the Upper East Side, the area where I live. (The 19th-century apartment buildings and townhouses of the Upper West Side are admittedly more photogenic.) It looked familiar enough to force me to hit pause and call Sue into the living room. 

"Does this look familiar?" I asked. As we let the scene continue for a couple of seconds, we simultaneously screamed, "THATS OUR CO-OP!!!!" No wonder it looked familiar. I've been living here only since 1992, so cut me some slack.

It's the entrance two doors up from ours. The window is different -- I prefer the 1957 version -- and there's an air conditioner in the window. Of course, the blinds have changed, too. Otherwise -- yeah, it's the same place, alright.

The women continue down the block.

See the doorway second from the right? That's our place, a year after I was born. The co-op itself was built circa 1885, and has more character than anything they're putting up now.

What does it look like today?

It's a different fire hydrant. The planter to the left of our doorway is less overgrown than it was 64 years ago, There's a different tree on the right. And the doorway on the far right is currently covered by scaffolding outside the private school next door. It was supposed to have come down over a month ago, but they're likely waiting for the day before school to start. Bastards.

But wait, there's more! The women continue around the block to East End Avenue approaching 82nd Street.
 

Or are they? This shot initially confused me for a couple of reasons. At the end of the block there's a Gristede's grocery store -- which, until it was torn down a few years ago, was at the opposite end of the block during my time living here. And if it really was on a different corner in 1957, then the women are approaching it from the south rather than the north if they were walking from my block. How crazy TV can be!

Was it really East End Avenue? The awning reading "Fifty Two" gave me a clue. I was positive which block this was.

Hey look -- more scaffolding! I had to crop the photo to approximate the angle of the screenshot, but, yup, this is East End between 81st and 82nd. The stationery store is now a dry cleaner. The deli next to it is still a deli today. The five story walk-up at 52 East End and the adjoining Gristede's have been replaced by a high-rise apartment building, which is hidden by the scaffolding. 

Hey, let's go shopping:

The next shot features the women exiting the deli, with Beverly Garland scouting the block first. As you can see, the deli features "Table Luxuries", which back then probably meant salami sliced extra-thin. Today it means overpriced pink Himalayan salt and vegan marinara sauce.

Now it's Yura on East End, where we often get the neighborhood's finest turkey club sandwich. It's nothing like the mini-grocery store it used to be, but we have plenty of those, anyway. The table luxuries are a thing of the past, though, unless you count the grilled chicken avocado BLT.

I wondered why I didn't recognize our co-op immediately. Unlike a lot of the location shots on Decoy and Naked City, the exterior of our building is exactly the same as it was then. The only reason I can come up with is that I wasn't expecting to see it. How often do you expect to see your house on a 54 year-old TV show?

PS: This is how our building looked in 1939: Exactly the same.

 

                                                     *********************