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The Fantastic Four's Yancy Street in the MCU confirmed with "kosher groceries and a synagogue" in First Steps
Yancy Street, where Ben Grimm's The Thing grew up, is staying true to the Jewish roots of New York's Lower East Side in The Fantastic Four: First Steps
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Yancy Street may not be a real location in New York's Lower East Side, but just about any Manhattanite can tell you that the spirit of Yancy Street is real. Jack Kirby modeled it off of the Lower East Side that he grew up in in the 1920s and 30s, when it was a low-income melting pot neighborhood home to Ashkenazi Jews, Eastern European immigrants, Irish people, and Italians. While the neighborhood was gentrified some twenty years ago, the neighborhood's Jewish roots can still be spotted today with synagogues and kosher grocery stores.
As it turns out, both "kosher groceries and a synagogue" would be the basis for the MCU's depiction of Yancy Street, evident in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. While a synagogue can be seen in the background of a shot of Yancy Street from the trailer for First Steps, a new cover story from Entertainment Weekly goes further into how Ben Grimm's stomping grounds were developed for the big screen.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who plays Ben Grimm and The Thing in First Steps, felt the authenticity of the MCU's Yancy Street. Moss-Bachrach said, "Jack Kirby wrote this character [of Ben Grimm] as a bit of an homage to his father, and to the streets that he grew up on. I'm a New Yorker, and I've spent a lot of time on Essex Street, on Delancey, on Clinton. So it does feel like home to me, and the production did a beautiful job recreating that. It was so cool to walk down and see the hat seller and the fish seller. I was shocked that we were outside of London because it fully felt like the Lower East Side."
As a New Yorker myself (how many times am I going to bring this up while talking about this movie? Let's start counting), Moss-Bachrach's endorsement of First Steps's Yancy Street is all I need to know that my mother's old neighborhood is in good hands.
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