Big Daddy | 1999

Thirtysomething New York slacker Sonny Koufax (Adam Sandler) has to grow up quickly when he’s landed with five-year-old Julian (Cole and Dylan Dylan Sprouse) to look after.

Sonny’s pleasantly ramshackle apartment is 16 Mercer Street at Howard Street in SoHo. You can its exterior again in the background of Disney's Enchanted, as Amy Adams gets her tiara stolen by the old wino after arriving from 'Andalasia'.

For entertainment, Sonny takes Julian to watch rollerbladers falling over by the lake in Central Park, and in the evening takes him to a bar to watch a Jets game on TV. The ‘Blarney Stone’ bar is the Blarney Rock Pub, 137 West 33rd Street, opposite Penn Station, which has been serving up Guinness since 1969.

The restaurant where Julian is not allowed to pop in to use the rest room is French bistro-style Felix Restaurant, 340 West Broadway at Grand Street in SoHo. No problem. Julian, accompanied by Sonny, takes a pee against the side door. This image was used for the poster and now, sensibly, the doorway is hidden behind the restaurant’s rubbish bins.

After stopping to talk to a homeless guy (Steve Buscemi), the pair are too late for breakfast at McDonalds, 136 West 3rd Street at 6th Avenue, west of Washington Square in Greenwich Village.

It’s on 2nd Avenue at 82nd Street that Julian has to stop for another pee (yes, this is a recurring motif).

The exterior of the ‘Social Services department’, outside which Sonny phones his father to tell him he now has a son, is our old friend, the National Museum of the American Indian – previously the old US Customs House – Broadway at Bowling Green, Lower Manhattan (the art museum seen in Ghostbusters 2, a hotel in both The Royal Tenenbaums and Batman Forever, the site of the 'Immobiliare' takeover meeting in The Godfather Part II and also seen in in The Amazing Spider-Man).

Sonny and Julian sit down for a chat about fathers in Washington Square Park itself.

Sonny takes Julian Trick or Treating at the house of grumpy man (played by the director Dennis Dugan himself), 18 Commerce Street at 7th Avenue, Greenwich Village.

Still in the Village, Julian gets a hotdog, with plenty of ketchup, alongside Christopher Street Subway Station.

Sonny and Layla (Joey Lauren Adams) make quite a journey to do their laundry. ‘Suds Expressway’ is supposedly on ‘Bleecker Street’, though it’s actually the Expressway Laundromat, 142 Atlantic Avenue and Henry Street over in Brooklyn.

The Italian restaurant playing O Sole  Mio, to which Sonny takes Layla, is Puglia, 189 Hester Street, at Mulberry Street, in Little Italy. This lively restaurant has been serving up southern Italian fare since 1919 and, yes, you might well get to sing along with Jorge Buccio at the keyboard.

The custody hearing is held in Yonkers Courthouse, 100 South Broadway, up in Yonkers, north of the Bronx, in New York State.

---