This Place Looks Familiar, but Where’s Starbucks?

New York Times:

Signs in front of downtown stores last week asked visitors to “pardon our appearance.” Not because they were undergoing construction but rather because they looked as though someone had turned back time — 50 years, to be exact.

A Starbucks near Yale University’s freshman quadrangle had been transformed into a pub. Enson’s, a men’s clothing store, occupied its usual place on Chapel Street, but the bow ties in the window belied the contemporary paisley men’s shirts inside. The upscale Urban Baby store became a pawnshop offering 30-day loans.

A few feet away, the Hollywood crew responsible for the municipal makeover, and all the resulting double takes, was shooting the latest Indiana Jones movie, the fourth in the series starring Harrison Ford as a dashing archaeology professor with a knack for adventure. ...

Some Indiana Jones aficionados — including Yale’s vice president and secretary, Linda Koch Lorimer — believe the title character was partly modeled after Hiram Bingham III, a Yale faculty member who explored Machu Picchu in the early 1900s. But while the letter sweaters worn by extras last week were blue, like Yale’s, they had M, not Y, on their chests, and the stately commons where freshmen eat bore a Marshall College seal (the film’s producer is Frank Marshall).

Regardless, Yalies will probably recognize campus icons like those that figure prominently in an elaborate chase scene through the college grounds. Majestic-looking gates to courtyards get smashed. A century-old statue of a former Yale president appears to have its head lopped off, and the motorcycle that Mr. Ford’s character rides hurtles through the front doors of Sterling Memorial Library. ...

Denis Stewart, the film’s co-producer, said making the city look old-fashioned was not that hard. “It’s not that the city hasn’t progressed, but it’s the charm that is New Haven,” he said. “It still has a really wonderful feeling of Americana here.” ...

Doug McDermott, a plumber for Yale who was eyeing the bevy of vintage cars parked on College Street on Thursday, seemed unworried. “They can’t do any more damage than the students do,” he said. Besides, he said, if they do, “it keeps us busy.”