After Hours | 1985

New York’s SoHo district is the setting for the best of eighties ‘yuppie nightmare’ genre movies. It's a minor Martin Scorsese film, but it piles on the paranoia with a furious energy.

Word processor (back in the days when that was a job description) Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) ventures down to this expensive, if rundown, artsy enclave to meet goofy Marcy Franklin (Rosanna Arquette).

If you really want to follow him, take the subway down to Spring Street, the station where the near-penniless Paul fails to talk his way onto the platform when ticket prices are suddenly hiked up.

28 Howard Street at Crosby Street is the spacious loft of dour sculptress Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino), where Marcy inconsiderately conks out, leaving Paul broke, stranded and at the mercy of fearsomely protective locals. It’s been seriously gentrified since 1985 and now houses a smart clothes shop.

The wonderfully obliging diner to which Paul scuttles back throughout the course of an increasingly frantic night was the River Diner, 452 11th Avenue at 37th Street, way to the north. Unfortunately, it’s recently been demolished.

Further west still is the ‘Terminal Bar’, where Tom the Barman (John Heard) pours beer and Paul keeps company with a brace of leather queens. You've missed the opportunity to try a beer here, Irish tap room, the Emerald Pub, which opened in 1972, finally cloed its doors for good in 2015. It stood at 308 Spring Street at Renwick Street.

Across the road, at 307 Spring Street, you can see the apartment of ‘Miss Beehive 1965’, disaffected barmaid, Teri Garr.

The elaborate iron gates of Paul ’s workplace, outside which he’s finally dumped, are those of the Metropolitan Life Tower, Madison Avenue between 23rd and 24th Streets by Madison Square Park.

---