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Location: The Piers
There are also two contrasting scenes of shape-ups on the now demolished Pier C at Fourth and River. In the first, Terry rebuffs an approach by Crime Commission investigators, and gets a cushy job in the loft as a reward for his services, and as a symbol of his standing with the mob. Then, the dock boss, one of Friendly's cronies, tosses the remaining chits in the air to humiliate the desperate longshoremen.
In the second, which takes place after the fight scene, a battered Terry, barely able to stand, defiantly appears for the shape-up only to be humiliated himself when work chits are distributed to everyone else, including a street bum. (This has been a busy day for Terry. He has already been to the Crime Commission hearing, visited Edie's apartment, mourned for his dead pigeons, and done considerable soul-searching about what to do next. One wonders what time the makers of the film thought longshoremen went to work.) In the event, the longshoremen refuse to enter Pier C unless Terry is also hired; Terry staggers through the iron gates to the side door of the pier; and, as the rest of the longshoremen trundle after Terry, Friendly rants, "Where you guys goin'? I'll remember this. I'll remember every one of you. Don't you forget that. I'll be back."
Several other scenes take place at water's edge. In one, as Terry reclines reading a girlie magazine in a loft inside Pier C, Charlie instructs him to spy on a church meeting Father Barry has called. The scene is memorable for the older brother's pun: "You wouldn't mind working once in a while to justify this lofty position."
In another, Terry, persuaded by Father Barry to tell Joey's sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint) of his unwitting role in Joey's murder, meets her at the foot of Eleventh Street. (She is on her way to meet Barry. But what a nice young girl from a Catholic College is doing walking along the waterfront is never explained.) With most of the conversation drowned out by steam whistles, Terry confesses, extenuating his confession with the refrain, "Honest to God, Edie. I didn't know." Visible in the background is the old Hoboken Shore Railroad, whose two locomotives ran bewteen Fourth Street and Fourteenth Street.
In a third, which takes place on the northern-most bend in what is now Frank Sinatra Drive and almost directly in front of Sibyl's Cave, Friendly advises Terry that, while he has been courting Edie, "a certain Timothy J. Dugan had a secret session with the Crime Commission." Charlie adds threateningly that Terry's fascination with Edie is "an unhealthy relationship." The colonnade on the east side of the street was the facade of the Long Dock.
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