Where Stan Lee's fictional superheroes lived in the real New York

The Avengers Mansion was a Beaux-Arts palace because Mr. Lee had Henry Clay Frick's Beaux-Arts palace on the Upper East Side in mind. Fans know it as 890 Fifth Avenue

Stan Lee, the mastermind of comics who plotted countless splats, yeeows and kabooms, created a four-color universe of crime fighters in tights that looked like New York, because it was. Somehow, it seemed grittier than the landscapes on which other superheroes flew and fought. But above all, it was real.

His Fantastic Four knew their way around the Lower East Side — Mr. Lee, who died on Monday, once said the very name of the fictional Yancy Street gang, the neighborhood nuisances who tormented the character known as the Thing, was a play on the actual Delancey Street, which runs