5 Pointz (Now You See Me)

The greatest trick the Four Horsemen ever pulled was making themselves vanish off a real building — and then the building vanished for real. In the climax of Now You See Me (2013), Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher, and Dave Franco announce their final show at 5 Pointz, the graffiti-covered warehouse in Long Island City. The FBI converges, the crowd roars, and the Horsemen leap off the roof, dissolving into a shower of (counterfeit) money. Director Louis Leterrier shot it at the actual 5 Pointz, then the world’s most famous aerosol-art mecca. Within months of the film’s release, the real building was whitewashed overnight and demolished. Now you see it, now you don’t — the movie’s tagline became the building’s epitaph.

The Scene

The finale is the film’s showpiece: the Horsemen, magician-criminals who’ve spent the movie robbing banks and raining cash on audiences, broadcast that their last performance will happen at 5 Pointz. It’s the perfect venue for them — a maze of color, a landmark that looks like a magic trick itself. Leterrier’s crew filmed at the real location during their 60-day shoot, using the graffiti-splashed exteriors for the massive crowd scenes and the building’s raw industrial interior for the behind-the-scenes maneuvering. When the Horsemen jump and burst into a blizzard of bills, the setting sells the impossibility: this is a place that already looked unreal.

In the story, the money is fake and the escape is real — the crowd’s frenzy to grab the bills covers the Horsemen’s getaway.

The Backstory

The building at 45–46 Davis Street (at Jackson Avenue) in Long Island City opened in 1892 as the Neptune Meter factory, which built water meters. Developer Jerry Wolkoff bought it in the early 1970s and, starting in the 1990s, leased its interior as artists’ studios. In 2002 he hired graffiti artist Jonathan “Meres One” Cohen to curate the exterior walls, and the building was reborn as 5Pointz — named for the five boroughs coming together — a 200,000-square-foot open-air aerosol museum with hundreds of technicolor murals by writers from around the world.

Then, in November 2013, Wolkoff had the murals whitewashed overnight without warning, and the building was demolished in 2014 to make way for residential towers. The artists sued — and in February 2018 a federal judge ruled that Wolkoff had violated the Visual Artists Rights Act, awarding $6.75 million in damages to 21 artists. It was a precedent-setting decision: aerosol art, the court said, is art, with legal protection.

What to Look For

The original walls are gone, but the hunt isn’t empty. The luxury towers that replaced 5 Pointz — at 22-44 Jackson Avenue — carry the 5Pointz name, with graffiti-inspired art worked into the lobbies and common areas: a corporate echo of the mecca. Stand at the corner of Jackson Avenue and Davis Street, look up at where the murals were, and listen for the 7 train rumbling past Court Square — the same elevated line that once gave millions of riders a free gallery view of the walls.

Getting There

The former 5 Pointz site: Jackson Avenue and Davis Street, Long Island City, Queens (the new towers are at 22-44 Jackson Avenue).

Subway: take the 7 to Court Square, the E, M, or R to Court Square–23rd Street, or the G to Court Square — all within a few blocks.

Trivia

• “5 Pointz” (also styled 5Pointz) literally denotes the five boroughs of New York converging in one spot.
• The whitewashing happened overnight in November 2013 — artists arrived to find two decades of work painted white with no warning.
• The 2018 VARA ruling was the first major application of the Visual Artists Rights Act to aerosol art, and the $6.75 million award was the maximum statutory damages.
• 5 Pointz also appears in the series finale of Rescue Me (2011) — with the building shown on fire — and in music videos including Joss Stone’s “Tell Me ‘Bout It,” filmed on one of its outside staircases.

The Hunt Clue

At Jackson and Davis, the colors ran free —

Five boroughs’ canvas for the world to see.

The Horsemen leapt; the walls agree:

Now you see it — now you don’t — that’s the key.

The towers rose where the art would be —

Dear hunter, imagine the gallery.

Photo by Eco84 via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0