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This film festival takes you from Hoyt-Schermerhorn to Hollywood
By
Verónica Del Valle
Published Apr 7, 2026
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Courtesy of BAM.
By
Verónica Del Valle
Published Apr 7, 2026
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In a scene from the 1990 puppet superhero movie "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," television journalist April O’Neil storms out of New York City Hall and heads straight into the subway. The words “City Hall” dangle above her head on a sign in big block letters.
But behind that scene, there’s a secret. She’s not where the movie says she is.
“April O'Neil comes down out of City Hall as the ace reporter and then walks into the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station,” said Brooklyn Academy of Music Director of Programming Jesse Trussel.
That secret, that the Downtown Brooklyn station is subbing in for City Hall, is at the heart of an upcoming film series at BAM, called “Hoyt-Schermerhorn: Stand Clear of the Closing Doors.” Every movie being shown contains scenes shot in and around the station.
The 1979 cult classic “The Warriors,” about a scrappy, leather-clad gang from Coney Island battling its way back home after falsely being accused of a murder, is a prime example. Hoyt-Schermerhorn subs in for both the 96th Street and Union Square stations. Eagle-eyed viewers can see the word “Hoyt” on the subway tile in the background in one scene.
Participating in a filmic Easter egg hunt is part of the fun of the series to BAM Rose Cinemas Senior Manager Adam Goldberg, who helped put together the screenings. He wants crowds to be able to say, “That's not in Queens, that's not uptown, that's Hoyt-Schermerhorn.”
The planned showings are, in part, an attempt to celebrate the station — which is just a few blocks from the theater — and its 90th birthday. The Hoyt-Schermerhorn station opened on April 9, 1936, before the subway network existed as New Yorkers currently know it. For decades, it served as a critical junction point between two important subway lines: the IND Crosstown line and IND Fulton Street line. But when train service changed on those lines in 1946, the MTA stopped running trains on tracks serving two of the Hoyt platforms.
That left the station with a decommissioned area ripe for filming. Subway cars can be run on the tracks and actors can stand on the platforms with minimal disruption to everyday commuters.
Beyond their shared location, Goldberg thinks all the movies in the BAM series hearken back to a time he likes to call “bad old days New York.” Half of the featured movies were released in the 1980s, when then-Mayor Ed Koch promised he would bring back law and order and claw the boroughs back from financial ruin.
Goldberg pointed to “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “The Warriors” as prime examples. April O’Neil is accosted in the Hoyt station by masked villains called the Foot Clan in the “Turtles” film. Police chase the Warriors gang through their lawless version of New York City.
Even “The Taking of Pelham 123,” the newest movie featured in the series, pays homage to this history. The film is a 2009 adaptation of an earlier book and movie of the same name, about an armed gang taking hostages on a crowded 6 train. The unused train track at Hoyt-Schermerhorn Streets stands in for tunnels south of 51st Street in Manhattan.
But not every movie in the series is all doom and gloom. Director Sidney Lumet used the station as the location of the fictional Emerald City subway in his star-studded, 1978 reinterpretation of “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Wiz.” In that film, the subway is a symbol of the characters coming to exist in a more real version of the world.
“The subway is a site of drama in New York City movies,” Trussel said. “It's something mysterious or something romantic. It's this great meeting point of New Yorkers… that I think has always led to some great movies over the years.”
“Hoyt-Schermerhorn: Stand Clear of the Closing Doors” will run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from April 9 until April 16.
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Verónica Del Valle
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