"The Dexter Neighborhood":

The majority of location filming for the Showtime TV series "Dexter" is done in Long Beach.

And a surprising amount of that filming is done in a single Long Beach residential section that I like to call "The Dexter Neighborhood"...

(The residents, however, insist on calling it 'Los Altos'.)

This one area of Long Beach, comprised of just a few blocks, contains at least eight different filming locations from the TV show - and that's from Season One alone.

These include:

	Dexter's childhood home (where he is seen in flashbacks, growing up with his foster family).
	Rita's house, the home of Dexter's girlfriend.
	Angel's house, the former home of Angel's co-worker.
	The house of the neighbor with the noisy dog.
	The Dade City house that Dexter inherits from his biological father.
	The house of the old lady across the street (who runs afoul of the "Cable Repairman").
	The intersection where the "Ice Truck Killer" stops his car to check on his captive.
	The schoolyard where young Dexter almost kills a bully.
	And the playground where Paul takes the kids for an unsupervised visit.

The "Dexter neighborhood" is located just south of the San Diego (405) Freeway, and just east of Bellflower Blvd, and north of 23rd Street), in upper Long Beach.

Most of these locations are homes, which are concentrated on three local streets: the 2300 block of San Anseline Avenue, the 2400 block of Chatwin Avenue, and the 5500 block of E. Rolanda Street. (The remaining locations are near the two schools just west of these homes.)

Here is an aerial photo of the neighborhood. And here is a map link with all of the locations marked.

But this isn't the only neighborhood in Long Beach where they have filmed. They have also shot in two locations down by Long Beach's Naples Island, two more near Bay Shore Beach, once at Shoreline Village, and twice at a Long Beach hotel on PCH. (I've heard that in the second season, they added a hotel near the Queen Mary to the list).

Surprisingly, perhaps, only one of the first season's memorable crime scenes was shot in Long Beach, but it was one of the most gruesome - the one where the "Ice Truck Killer" left his dismembered victim's body parts neatly wrapped as presents under a Christmas tree at a Santa's Village.
Most of the murder scenes were shot in Miami, while they used Long Beach for most of the residential shots.

But then again, Long Beach was also the location of the "Ice Truck Killer's" home base, where he actually did-in his many victims (off-camera) before dispersing the bodies around to various other locations. (And that villain's lair is also where the "Ice Truck Killer" eventually met his fate, at the hands of Dexter.)

Only Miami was used more often as a filming location than Long Beach in the first season. And that Miami filming was mostly limited to the show's first five episodes - amazing when you consider that Dexter is supposed to live in Miami...

After that, the producers decided that it wasn't worth the expense of going all the way to Florida, when they could recreate the look of Miami so easily in Long Beach and other L.A. locales. All they needed to do was drop in an establishing shot or two of the real Miami and they were good to go.

Of course, they don't limit their California filming to Long Beach.  They've shot all around the L.A. area, from Marina Del Rey to Exposition Park, from San Pedro to Sun Valley... Click here for a list of the locations indexed by city.