Miller's Crossing New Orleans Locations

From here:

The pre-planning for "Miller's Crossing" began with four single-spaced pages of location descriptions written by the Coens to communicate to their early collaborators the precise look, feel and camera needs of each location in the film. (The most laconic was the description of Verna's place: "Modest one-bedroom apartment, large living room. Verna doesn't care where she lives, and neither do we.")

Armed with these notes, the Coens and line producer Graham Place visited three different cities before settling on New Orleans, where economic factors and a preservation movement dating from the Thirties had left many buildings from the Twenties intact. Working with production designer Dennis Gassner and location manager Amy Ness, and aided by local assistant location manager Jimmy Otis, they started finding or building the locations that would be combined on film to create the imaginary Prohibition-era city in which the story takes place.

New Orleans cooperated. For the scenes in Leo's club, which displays the tasteful oldworld style of its affluent proprietor, the members of the city's staid International House opened their doors for the first time to a film crew. During the days when the downstairs dining-room was needed for filming, the members took their lunch in a smaller upstairs room, where little cards on the table informed them that they were being inconvenienced "to facilitate filming in New Orleans."

The merchants on Magazine Street in the less affluent downtown area, which boasts several blocks that still look like the Twenties, imposed severer restrictions. To avoid interrupting commerce, angles were carefully calculated and scheduled to permit a "walk-and-talk" scene to be shot in one day. With the help of sprinklers, Picayune Street (named after the city's leading newspaper) became the location for a rainy nighttime "walk-and-talk" with Tom and Verna. Fireworks erupted on Church Street, which became the scene of a shoot-out between police and the denizens of Leo's social club, The Sons of Erin. And a tiny Dickensian alley locked away behind an ancient gate became Rug's Alley, where a hood named Rug Daniels loses his life (and his toupee) early in the film.

The hardest location to find was Caspar's Great Room, a gigantic panelled room ("they don't call it the Great Room for nothing") where Tom confronts the up-and-coming gangster Johnny Caspar, whose club is still a shabby affair ("a down-and-dirty speakeasy, gaming place, clip joint") because the proprietor has put all his money into his home. Due to its shifting soil, New Orleans is not a city where things were built big - the typical New Orleans house is a lot of small connecting parlors - but the filmmakers found their Great Room in Gallier Hall, the former City Hall named for the architect who brought the Greek Revival style to New Orleans. Its large English-style rooms are now rented out for wedding receptions and other functions requiring lots of space, and two of them, considerably rebuilt, served as Caspar's Great Room and the Mayor's Office in the film. The exterior and foyer of Caspar's house were filmed at the exclusive Louise S. McGehee School, another New Orleans institution which had never played host to a film crew.

Leo's home, which is the scene of a nighttime attack by a pair of hit-men, was put together out of four separate locations, including Northline, a street in the Old Metairie section of town where the filmmakers blew up a car, and two constructed sets. (The making of this complex sequence, which took several weeks to shoot, is described in the March issue of Premiere.)

All the sets that had to be built were housed in a huge garage on Annunciation Street owned by the Toye Brothers, a local real estate firm. Here, for example, the filmmakers built Tom's apartment, with its semi-circular living room which had to be, the filmmakers told Gassner, "like the inside of Tom's head."

The scenes in Miller's Crossing, the majestic forest where destinies cross and where the Coens brought to life their seminal image of thugs in the woods, were filmed on a treefarm ninety minutes from the city, with the overcast skies the company had planned on when they scheduled their stay in New Orleans for late winter and early spring.