The Irishman’s gangster landmarks are scattered across New Jersey, Long Island and South Philadelphia, and most of them are still standing, doing nothing more dramatic these days than serving coffee or housing a private family. Martin Scorsese filmed the bulk of the story in and around New York, but the real Frank Sheeran spent his life in Irish and Italian neighbourhoods that rarely make it into a film review.
That’s the gap ConnollyCove wants to fill. We cover Irish heritage and film tourism side by side, and Sheeran’s story sits right at the join: an Irish-American hitman, raised Catholic, operating inside an Italian crime family, buried in a cemetery outside Philadelphia that almost nobody writing about the film ever mentions.
Table of Contents
More Than a Gangster Film: The Irish-American Story Behind Frank Sheeran
Frank Sheeran was Irish-American, and that detail shapes the whole film even though Scorsese rarely says it out loud. Sheeran grew up in a working-class Irish-Catholic household in Pennsylvania, the kind of background shared by hundreds of thousands of families who arrived during and after the Great Famine and settled along the same East Coast corridor: New York, Boston, Philadelphia. Ireland’s diaspora shaped entire industries in those cities, from the docks to the unions Sheeran himself worked for.
His surname is worth pausing on, too. Sheeran comes from the Gaelic Ó Siodhacháin, and ConnollyCove’s guide to the lore of Irish surnames covers how names like this travelled from Munster parishes to American passenger lists, often changing spelling more than once along the way. It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of detail that turns a mob film into a migration story if you know where to look.
The Key Landmarks: Where Scorsese’s Camera Met Real History
Scorsese and his location team used more than a hundred sites to build the film’s decades-spanning world, and they leaned heavily on towns that had kept their mid-century architecture. New Jersey, Long Island and upstate New York all stood in for places the story never actually visited on screen, including Philadelphia and Detroit. The result is a film where almost nothing was shot where it was set, which makes the “reel versus real” gap unusually wide.
Paterson, New Jersey: The Diner Behind a Real-Life Disappearance
Paterson stood in for several of the film’s roadside and diner scenes, and it’s one of the few filming locations that sits close to where events connected to the story genuinely happened. The area’s classic 1950s storefronts needed little alteration to pass for an earlier decade. If you’re planning a stop here, it works best as a short detour from Manhattan rather than a destination in its own right, since there’s little for a visitor to do beyond seeing the street itself.
Villa Roma in Huntington: Long Island’s 1970s Time Capsule
The Villa Roma, used in the film as a Bufalino crew hangout, is a real venue in Huntington, Long Island, and by most accounts, it has changed remarkably little since the decade the film depicts. Long Island supplied several of the production’s interiors, largely because its older commercial buildings hadn’t been renovated into something unrecognisable. Locals occasionally point tourists towards it, though it remains a working business rather than a museum piece, so visiting means being a respectful customer rather than a sightseer with a camera.
Brooklyn and Queens: Turning New York Back Fifty Years
Brooklyn carried much of the film’s industrial and street-level texture, including scenes shot around the old Navy Yard and in Williamsburg, a neighbourhood that has changed so much since 2019 that some of the exact blocks used are barely recognisable now. In Dyker Heights, a working restaurant was dressed up to resemble a vintage Howard Johnson’s, and in Cobble Hill, an ice cream shop stood in for a mob social club. None of this required leaving New York City, which says something about how carefully the production scouted for streets that had resisted gentrification.
Philadelphia: Frank Sheeran’s Real Turf
Philadelphia barely appears on screen, yet it’s where Sheeran actually lived, worked and eventually died, and it’s the part of the story most filming-location guides skip entirely. South Philadelphia’s Irish and Italian parishes sat close together for generations, sharing the same churches, corner bars and funeral homes long before Sheeran’s story made headlines. That closeness between communities is easy to miss unless you’ve walked those streets yourself.
“Walking through South Philadelphia’s old parish streets, you can still feel how close together the Irish and Italian communities really were,” says Ciaran Connolly, Founder of ConnollyCove. “Frank Sheeran’s story only makes proper sense once you understand that his world wasn’t really New York’s, it was Philadelphia’s, and it was built on those tight, overlapping neighbourhoods.”
Sheeran was Catholic, and the film’s closing chapters lean on that faith more than viewers might expect: a nursing home, a priest, a late confession. The structure of an Irish-Catholic funeral, the wake, the Requiem Mass, the burial, would have been entirely familiar to Sheeran’s own family, and ConnollyCove’s guide to the tradition of the Irish wake covers how those same rites travelled with Irish emigrants and still shape Irish-American funerals today.
Visiting the Sites Today: A Then-and-Now Guide
Most of the film’s key sites are still standing, though their current use varies considerably, and some have changed hands since 2019. The Brooklyn Navy Yard remains an active industrial complex rather than a tourist site, so views are limited to the perimeter. Businesses used as stand-ins in Dyker Heights and Cobble Hill continue trading under their real names, which means the easiest way to “visit” the film is simply to eat or drink somewhere that once stood in for someone else’s set.
The Michigan Trail: Mapping the Jimmy Hoffa Disappearance
Michigan never appears as a filming location, yet it’s central to the plot, since Jimmy Hoffa’s 1975 disappearance from a restaurant car park outside Detroit remains one of the film’s driving mysteries. The production recreated the geography of that disappearance elsewhere, which means anyone hoping to retrace Hoffa’s actual last movements needs to look at Detroit’s suburbs rather than anywhere Scorsese actually filmed. It’s a useful reminder that a “gangster landmarks” trail covers two separate maps: where the story happened, and where the cameras were.
Planning Your Own Scorsese Trail: A Traveller’s Guide
A New York and New Jersey version of this trail works comfortably as a long weekend, with Brooklyn, Long Island and Paterson all reachable without a car if you’re happy to combine the subway, the PATH train and short taxi rides. Visitors travelling from Ireland or the UK should budget for a hire car if Philadelphia is on the list, since public transport between the two cities is slower than the distance suggests.
Fans travelling primarily for film tourism might also enjoy how a very different production used real landscapes rather than dressed-up ones: ConnollyCove’s guide to Game of Thrones filming locations in Northern Ireland covers sites you can walk through exactly as they appeared on screen, which makes an interesting contrast with The Irishman’s approach of disguising ordinary streets as somewhere else entirely.
Reel vs Real: The Irishman’s Locations at a Glance
| Film Location | Real-World Setting | What It Stood In For | Current Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paterson, New Jersey | Passaic County | Diner and street scenes | Working town, limited visitor interest |
| Villa Roma, Huntington | Long Island | Bufalino crew social club | Active business |
| Brooklyn Navy Yard | Brooklyn, NYC | Industrial backdrop | Working industrial site, perimeter views only |
| Dyker Heights restaurant | Brooklyn, NYC | Howard Johnson’s diner | Trading under its own name |
| Cobble Hill ice cream shop | Brooklyn, NYC | Andrea Doria Social Club | Trading under its own name |
| Hempstead Town Hall | Long Island | Teamsters headquarters | Municipal building |
| South Philadelphia (unfilmed) | Philadelphia | Sheeran’s real home and community | Residential neighbourhood |
Why These Landmarks Still Matter
These landmarks matter because they preserve a version of urban America that has largely disappeared elsewhere: tight immigrant neighbourhoods, union halls, parish churches within walking distance of each other. Scorsese found streets in New Jersey and Long Island that had escaped major redevelopment, and in doing so, he accidentally preserved a snapshot of the built environment that shaped Sheeran’s generation. Travellers drawn to film locations often discover, once they arrive, that the real history sitting just outside the frame is more interesting than the scene that was actually shot there.
Frequently Asked Questions About The Irishman’s Gangster Landmarks
Here’s what people most often ask before planning a visit to these sites.
Where is the real Frank Sheeran buried?
Frank Sheeran is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia.
Can you visit the house used in the film?
The house used to represent Sheeran’s fictional Philadelphia home is a private residence in White Plains, New York, not in Philadelphia itself. Please view it from the street only and respect the occupants’ privacy.
What is the Villa Roma in real life?
It’s a real, still-operating venue in Huntington, Long Island, used in the film as a Bufalino family social club. It isn’t set up for tourism, so treat a visit as a normal customer would.
Are the Philadelphia locations safe to visit?
South Philadelphia’s residential streets are generally safe to walk during the day, as with most city neighbourhoods. Sheeran’s actual home isn’t a marked or public site, so there’s little reason to seek out a specific address.
What does “The Irishman” mean in the film’s title?
It refers to Frank Sheeran’s nickname within the largely Italian-American Bufalino crime family, marking him as a trusted outsider. The title plays on his Irish-Catholic identity inside a world that wasn’t his by birth.
When is the best time of year to visit these locations?
Fine autumn weather across New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania makes for fine walking conditions and clearer photography, with far fewer crowds than in summer. Winter is workable too, but pack for genuinely cold, damp weather in all three states.
