The Fast and the Furious filming locations: Dom's house is real — and so mobbed that Google blurred it on Street View
Almost nothing in the 2001 original was built on a backlot. The house, the market, the race streets and the diner are real addresses in Los Angeles, and one of them has spent twenty-five years dealing with the consequences.
Rob Cohen shot the first film across real Los Angeles and Orange County neighborhoods, most of which are still standing. One of them is somebody's actual house, and it has its own Instagram location tag.
The address is 722 East Kensington Road, in Angeleno Heights — the oldest part of Echo Park, just over the 101 from downtown. It's a two-storey white wood-frame place with the porch the franchise made famous, and both interiors and exteriors were shot inside the real property rather than on a stage. It has appeared in multiple sequels. Deckard Shaw blows it up on screen in Furious 7. The real one is fine.
What living there is actually like
Visitors show up every day. A neighboring property keeps a hand-written STAY OFF DRIVEWAY sign up because fans park where the picture cars parked. A fence has gone in. The house is blurred on Google Street View.
That last part is worth understanding correctly, because it isn't something Google does for famous addresses on its own initiative. Any resident can use the "report a problem" tool on a Street View image to request their building be obscured, and Google's blurring of a private property is permanent and cannot be reversed afterwards — including by a later owner. It's a homeowner's decision, not a studio one.
The corner store is real too. Bob's Market, 1234 Bellevue Avenue at Kensington Road, played Toretto's Market — about a block from the house.
Owner John Hong has said people turn up daily to photograph the storefront and try to order the tuna sandwich Mia makes for Brian, which is not on the menu because it was never a real menu item.
Where the driving was shot
- Opening street race — Clock Street, off South Alameda Street in downtown LA. The site is now the ROW DTLA complex.
- The main race sequence — Prairie Avenue between 118th and 120th Streets in Hawthorne.
- The Racer's Edge — 1046 North Orange Drive, Hollywood, just south of Santa Monica Boulevard.
- Race Wars — San Bernardino International Airport, a decommissioned air force base.
- The final truck-and-train finish — Terminal Way on Terminal Island, in the Port of Los Angeles.
- The opening truck hijack — filmed at Dodger Stadium, 1000 Vin Scully Avenue, standing in for open road.
The Orange County and coastal locations
Johnny Tran's turf was shot in Little Saigon, Westminster, at the Vietnamese Cultural Court, 9221 Bolsa Avenue, with the Asian gateway at 9631 Bolsa Avenue. The biker bar where Brian and Dom stop is Neptune's Net, 42505 Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, which is still open and still trading on it.
What you can't visit
- Cha Cha Cha — the restaurant at 656 North Virgil Avenue in Silver Lake, where Brian takes Mia. Demolished.
- El Gato Negro — the bar doesn't exist and never did. It was a set built on a vacant lot in El Segundo.
For the record: the film's production team picked Angeleno Heights partly because the street grid and the hillside cottages photographed as a neighborhood rather than a set. Twenty-five years later, the neighborhood is the reason the current residents wanted the pixels.
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