Joker Stairs

Where it sits. The West 167th Street Stairs, known locally as the Shakespeare Steps and to the rest of the world as the Joker Stairs, climb the ridge between Shakespeare Avenue at the top and Anderson Avenue at the bottom in Highbridge, in the western Bronx. The 167th Street station on the 4 train is a block away at the top of the hill, and Yankee Stadium is about a mile and a half south. The staircase runs in two long flights with a central handrail and a mid-point landing, hemmed in by retaining walls and the flanks of red-brick apartment blocks, and it drops steeply enough that from the upper landing you look out over the rooftops towards the Harlem River valley.

Why the staircase exists at all. This is not a monument, an ornament or a park feature. It is a public street. The Bronx sits on a series of steep north-south ridges of Fordham gneiss and Manhattan schist, and where the street grid ran up a slope too sharp for carriages the city built a staircase and gave it a street name. Around a hundred of these step streets exist across the borough, most of them dating from the first three decades of the twentieth century, and they remain legally roadways: the city maintains them, they carry street signs, and residents use them daily to reach the subway. That ordinariness is exactly what the film wanted.

On screen. In Todd Phillips's Joker (2019), Arthur Fleck's commute is up these stairs, and the film returns to them repeatedly to show him climbing home worn out in ordinary clothes. Near the climax he comes down them in the opposite state entirely — red suit, green hair, full makeup — dancing to Gary Glitter's Rock and Roll Part 2 in the sequence that became the film's defining image and its poster. Joaquin Phoenix's descent runs the full length of both flights, and the geography on screen is exactly the geography on the ground, with no set extension or relocation. The production returned for Joker: Folie à Deux in 2024. According to reporting in the New York Times, the film-makers had first looked at a staircase in the South Bronx used in American Gangster (2007), but it had been repaved and tidied to the point where it no longer looked right, and they moved north to Highbridge instead.

What you actually find. A plain municipal staircase of about 130 steps with a painted metal rail, concrete treads in varying states of repair, weeds at the edges and graffiti on the retaining walls. There is no plaque, no ticket, no shop and nothing built for visitors; the city has never marked it. At the foot of the stairs Anderson Avenue runs past bodegas and six-storey walk-ups; the building used as Arthur's apartment block stands nearby on the same street. On a warm afternoon there will be a handful of people photographing each other on the steps and rather more people carrying shopping up them.

Etiquette, which matters here. The stairs became a destination almost immediately after the film's release, and Highbridge residents have been vocal about what that felt like: crowds, selfie sticks and re-enactments blocking a staircase people need to reach the 4 train. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose district covers part of the borough, publicly asked visitors to leave the neighbourhood alone. Nobody is likely to object to a quiet visit, but this is a residential street in a working-class neighbourhood, not an attraction, and the difference is worth respecting: stand to one side, let people pass, keep the music off, and spend some money locally rather than arriving and leaving in an hour.

Getting there and what else is nearby. Take the 4 train to 167th Street and walk one block west; the top of the stairs is at the corner of Shakespeare Avenue. The Grand Concourse, the Bronx's four-mile Art Deco boulevard, is two blocks east and worth an hour on its own. The High Bridge, built in 1848 to carry the Croton Aqueduct across the Harlem River and reopened to walkers in 2015 after four decades closed, is fifteen minutes north and gives the best view in the borough. Yankee Stadium and the Bronx Museum of the Arts are both a short ride south on the same line, and Washington Heights lies directly across the High Bridge.

A note on what you are photographing. The stairs look steeper and more theatrical in the film than they do in daylight, which is a matter of framing, colour grading and a costume in primary red and green against grey concrete rather than of anything done to the location itself. Arriving to find an ordinary set of municipal steps is the standard reaction, and it is worth expecting: the interest here lies in how little was changed, not in how dramatic the place is on its own account. The film's crew added nothing permanent, and the city has since resurfaced sections in the normal course of maintenance.