In photographs from the shoot, the crew clusters near what was then the No. 9 Fisherman's Grotto building — a restaurant that had been doing business on that stretch since the 1930s — while the long corrugated wall of the Pier 45 shed fills the frame behind them. At the time, that shed was working waterfront infrastructure, built for the sardine trade that had already started its decline. Decades later, it would be reoccupied by the Musée Mécanique, which moved its collection of antique arcade machines there from the Cliff House in 2002.

What makes the photograph interesting, beyond the celebrity adjacent backstory, is the ordinariness of what surrounds the set: the unadorned commercial street, the trucks parked close, the workers looking less like they're making a movie than like they're loading a shipment. The Wharf was a working place, and a film crew was just another kind of work.

Pal Joey used San Francisco as a setting throughout — the film opens on the city and stays there — and the Wharf sequence gave the production a few minutes of textured, specific background that no studio lot could replicate. Whether anyone in the audience in 1957 recognized the Grotto facade is harder to say.

Anyone walking Pier 45 today would find the Musée Mécanique's entrance where the shed once stood empty, its vintage machines visible through the roll-up doors, the Grotto building long since altered. The block looks nothing like the film set, and nothing much like the working waterfront either — which is its own kind of continuity.