Appropriately enough, the film opens and closes on the Hoboken waterfront. Regrettably, however, most of the locations used in the production (around the rest of the city as well as on the docks) no longer exist. A prime example of the losses is the deliciously shabby office shack where the crooked boss of the fictional Local 374, Johnny Friendly (played by Cobb), conducts his business. The small structure was actually an old yacht club shed at the foot of the Fifth Street (Holland-America) pier, The floating hutch survived until the mid-1980s, when wind-swept sparks from a fire in the Levolor factory traveled across town and set it on fire. Two scenes outside the shed frame the movie. In the opening scene, Friendly and Terry Malloy (Brando) are leaving the shabby office. (The Holland-America liner Nieuw Amsterdam fills the background.) It is clear that Friendly is sending Malloy on a distasteful errand. Terry, the audience learns in the next shot, is to lure Joey Doyle up to a tenement rooftop for what Terry thinks will be a little roughing up, but it turns out to be a hit. The denouement begins where it all began, outside the shed, with Terry confronting Friendly ("I'm glad what I done to you.") and receiving one of the classic beatings in film history, as much for his self-satisfaction over having testified before the Crime Commission as for actually having done so. In an earlier scene, inside the shed, Charlie the Gent Malloy (Steiger) assures Friendly that "there's no evidence until he (his brother Terry) give public testimony" and refuses to set Terry up. In another, Friendly gathers up his cronies' pistols and puts them in a safe. "Did you ever hear of the Sullivan Law?" he asks them. "I'm gonna be indicted any minute. They're dustin' off the hot seat for me. We're a law 'bidin' union, understand?" 
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