L.A. Noire rebuilds Los Angeles in 1947 with fanatical care: the studio mapped the real streets, modelled building interiors on the originals, and filled the map with the city's landmarks. Detective Cole Phelps drives that recreation through traffic, homicide, vice and arson cases, and much of the city he moves through is still standing.
This tour follows the real places behind the game's map, from Union Station and Bunker Hill to Wilshire's art deco and the Hollywood movie palaces, then down to the river where the story ends. Every pin marks a real site the game put on its streets.
The Shawshank Redemption was filmed mostly in Ohio: Shawshank State Prison is the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, the opening trial is the Wyandot County Courthouse in Upper Sandusky, and the final beach is on Saint Croix.
The route follows Andy Dufresne from his trial to the Mansfield prison, the woodshop where Red hears Figaro, Brooks's halfway house and the Caribbean beach that stands in for Zihuatanejo.
The Roswell UFO incident of July 1947 began on a ranch near Corona, New Mexico, and ran through Roswell Army Air Field, Fort Worth and Wright Field in Ohio. The official explanation was a Project Mogul balloon.
This route follows the debris from the Alamogordo balloon launch to the Hangar 18 legend and the International UFO Museum in Roswell. Several stops are approximate, because the sources do not name exact spots.
The Crown rarely filmed where its story is set: Lancaster House played Buckingham Palace, Ely and Winchester cathedrals played Westminster Abbey and St Paul's, Cobham Hall played Eton, and Downing Street was built at Elstree Studios.
This route visits five of those stand-ins, from season one to season five, and says what each one played.
Sex and the City is set in Manhattan, and the 2008 film follows Carrie Bradshaw from her Perry Street stoop to the New York Public Library, Bemelmans Bar, Bryant Park and the Brooklyn Bridge.
Carrie's fictional address is on the Upper East Side, but the real brownstone is in Greenwich Village. This route follows the film's wedding, break-up and reunions through places that were actually used, from a Chelsea restaurant and a Central Park pavilion to a Brooklyn courthouse that plays City Hall.
Brigada is a crime series about four Moscow friends, Sasha Bely, Kosmos, Pchyola and Fil, who swear loyalty to each other on Sparrow Hills at dawn in 1989. Its plot visits the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment skyscraper and the Uzbekistan restaurant on Neglinnaya Street, and the series was written at Mosfilm and partly filmed in Taldom.
The route walks through the places the plot names in Moscow, then the studio where the script was written and the town where a station scene set in Chechnya was shot.
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's Mexico City: the Casa Azul in Coyoacán, where she was born, his murals in the National Palace and their studios in San Ángel. The two painters married in 1929 and made art in the city for decades.
The route runs from Frida's Blue House through Rivera's murals, the twin studio houses in San Ángel and the Trotsky house nearby, to the museum pyramid Diego built for his collection.
J. Robert Oppenheimer studies in Cambridge and Göttingen, builds a physics school at Berkeley, and is handed the one job nobody else wants: build the atomic bomb before the Nazis do. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer (2023) follows him from the Cavendish Laboratory to a secret mesa in New Mexico, through the Trinity test and the political fallout that ends his career.
This route follows the film's real places — Cambridge, Göttingen, LeConte Hall, Los Alamos, Trinity, the White House, the Institute for Advanced Study and the room where his security clearance was revoked. The film's own stand-ins, from Ghost Ranch to Kerckhoff Hall, Belen and Alhambra, are noted at each stop.
In April 1947 the Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl and five companions pushed off from Peru on a raft of nine balsa logs, built in the style of old Spanish drawings of South American rafts. They meant to prove that ancient people could have drifted from South America to Polynesia. After 101 days and almost 7,000 kilometres on the open Pacific, they crashed onto a coral reef in the Tuamotus — and all six walked ashore.
The voyage became a bestselling book and an Oscar-winning documentary. Heyerdahl's theory, though, has not survived: archaeology, language and genetics show that Polynesians came from the west, from Island Southeast Asia, as master navigators. The route follows the raft from Callao to Tahiti.
In 1961 the Freedom Riders took two buses from Washington, D.C. through Rock Hill, Anniston, Birmingham and Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi, to test the Supreme Court's ruling against segregated bus terminals. In Alabama a mob burned a bus while police looked away; hundreds more riders ended up in Mississippi's jails and Parchman Farm.
The route follows the rides through the places where it happened, several of them now museums and part of a National Monument.
Between 1947 and 1950 Sal Paradise, a young writer from New Jersey, crosses America again and again — hitchhiking, by bus and in borrowed cars — usually in pursuit of his wild, magnetic friend Dean Moriarty. Jack Kerouac typed the story on a continuous scroll of paper in three weeks in April 1951, and it was published in 1957. Sal is Kerouac, Dean is Neal Cassady, and most of the trips really happened.
The route picks out the places the novel names, from a rainy false start on the Hudson to Mexico City and back to a New York street corner. The novel gives towns and streets rather than addresses, so most pins mark areas, not doors.
