A. A motel or apartment house.

Q. Where is it supposed to be on the show?

A. In Miami.

Q. When did we see it on the show?

A. In Episode 2 (of Season 3), "Finding Freebo".

Debra is working on two cases.  The first case is the murder of Oscar Prado, where she's looking for his suspected killer, Freebo.
 The second is a dead Jane Doe found in the park.


Debra doesn't realize that the two cases are related, that her Jane Doe is Teegan, former girlfriend of Freebo.

She pressures Quinn's police informant, Anton, to provide her with information. So he leads her to this motel, home of a brash, young pimp named Javier; the idea being that if Debra's Jane Doe was a hooker, the pimp might know who she was.

Debra confronts Javier in his room, but the little sleazeball denies recognizing the dead in the photo.  Fortunately, one of his own drugged-up call girls rats him out, forcing Javier to confess that he had met her, but that he passed her off to a guy named Freebo.

Debra is shocked to find there's a connection between the two, and jumps to the mistaken conclusion that Freebo killed Teegan.

Q. What is it actually in real life?

A. An apartment house, but not in Miami.

Q. Where can I find it in real life?

A. This apartment house can be found at 4034 S. Pacific Ave, in San Pedro, down around Angels Gate Park, between W. 40th Street and Bluff Place.

It is perched right across the street from the edge of a cliff, so it comes as no surprise that it's called "Lands End".  (Or at least that's what's written on the side of the building.)

But don't expect to see those bright orange Miami walls. They painted them that way for the production and then painted them back to normal before they left. They apparently also painted the fence and doorframe, since both were green on the show (see the current photos below).

It's just a block east of Billy Fleeter's house and Zack's house.
And the pier where Dexter & Prado meet is less than a mile to the east, down at ocean level.




I shot the photos below in 2009






[ Warning: These are private apartments.  Do not knock on their doors, trespass on their property,
or do anything else that might disturb the residents. ]




And in a different part of San Pedro, they also filmed Freebo's house, and the park where they find the body of Freebo's girlfriend, Teegan.



Here is an aerial photo of the apartment house . And here is a map link.

Q. How the heck did you figure out where it was?

A. The street number (4034) is visible in the opening shot, but the number sign on the fence looked almost like it had been hand-written, so I wasn't sure if it was the real address. (I guess I should have known that if the producers had wanted to fake the address, they would have done a more professional job with the sign.)

I tried to find the motel in Long Beach, but that didn't work. I moved on to Hollywood, near the studio, but it wasn't there either. Perhaps that's because it's not a motel, it's an apartment house. I looked for them too, but focused mainly on motels.

Eventually, someone in the know tipped me that it was an apartment house in San Pedro, near the end of Gaffey Street, and that was all I needed. The 4034 address led me right to Pacific Ave and the Land's End.