Q. What is it supposed to be on the show? A. A residential street. Q. Where is it supposed to be on the show? A.  In or near Miami, Florida. Q. When did we see it on the show? A. We see this scene in Episode 9, of Season 1.  Suspicious that Captain Spencer may be involved in the child kidnappings, Dexter follows him as he drives to a residential neighborhood.    Parked in an alley nearby, Dexter watches as Spencer stops his car and hands off a small plastic grocery bag to a junkie named Victor. Dexter then follows Victor as he drives to a cartel stash house, where Victor hides the bag under his jacket before being admitted into the home. ( It turns out that the bag contains a shirt belonging to Spencer's young son, Nicky, which Spencer is planting in the cartel stash house as false evidence, to convince everyone that the cartel is responsible for the kidnapping of his son.) Q. What is it actually in real life? A. A residential street.

A. This scene was filmed on the 900 block of Chestnut Avenue, in Long Beach, CA.

( Although this location and the cartel stash house appear to be very near each other on the show, in real life the two locations are over 30 miles apart. )

When Spencer arrives, he is driving his car south down Chestnut Avenue. 
 
He pulls over to the curb to meet Victor, stopping his car between 915 Chestnut and 905 Chestnut, on the west side of the street.

In the scene, Dexter is sitting in his truck, parked in an alley on the east side of Chestnut Ave., watching Spencer hand off the bag space  to Victor.  That Long Beach alley is called Nordo Way.   
 
The gray & white building Dexter is parked next to (and which we see more of as he pulls out of the alley) is a small apartment house, located at 916 Chestnut Ave, on the east side of Chestnut.

After witnessing the handoff, Dexter follows Spencer and Victor's cars to where they stop at an intersection with a stop sign, and where they turn in opposite directions, forcing Dexter to decide which one of them to follow. He chooses to follow Victor's car.   
 
That stop sign intersection is the corner of Chestnut & 9th Street. (The camera is looking south in that scene.) 

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

A.  Trying to find this location drove me crazy for a long time.

In the scene, it appears that this location is very close to the cartel stash house, which is in the east San Fernando Valley. So I assumed that this handoff scene was probably filmed on the same day, in the same general area, perhaps a block or two away from that cartel house. But I couldn't find it.
 
(I should have known better, since I'm very aware that locations in Dexter which appear to be close to each other are often long distances apart in the real world.)

Early on, I noticed something intriguing: in the shot where Spencer and Dexter stop at a stop sign. In the distance, at the end of the street, I could see a very tall building, almost a skyscraper, yet visible from the residential street.

When I blew up that image of the distant building in Photoshop, it was very blurry, but had a distinct shape.

 

The only problem was that I knew that the east San Fernando Valley is a relatively flat area, with very few tall buildings. And when I checked out the few semi-skyscrapers that exist in the Valley (such as those near Universal Studios), none of them matched, and the residential streets didn't line up right for that kind of view.
 
Later when I learned that they had shot the psychiatrist's house in West Los Angeles, near Century City (where there are a number of very tall buildings), I briefly switched my search there. But once again I couldn't find a match for either the shape of the building or the view from the residential streets in the area.

After searching for ages for a residential street with that tall building at the end of it, and almost giving up, I finally stumbled across it, almost by accident, while working on the locations from the very last episode.

I was editing a StreetView of a portion of Shoreline Drive in Long Beach (where they shot a finale scene of Spencer driving towards his cargo ship), when I spotted a tall building that somewhat resembled the building I had been looking for.
 
So I took a closer look at the building, in 3D, and although it didn’t look exactly right from most angles, when I looked at it's north side, looking back south at the tower, it was a perfect match. Eureka!

I used Google Maps to find the address of the building, and learned it was located at 400 W. Ocean Blvd, in Long Beach. and was a 30-story condo tower known as West Ocean.

Once I had found the tall building, I just needed to find a residential street from which you could see the tower in the distanceat the end of the street. Checking the maps, I quickly saw that Chestnut Ave in Long Beach pointed right at it, and no other street offered the same view.

So I used StreetView to move north of the tower, block by block up Chestnut Ave, looking back south at the tower, and eventually found the right spot where all of the surrounding features matched. It was just north of the intersection of Chestnut & 9th Street, less than a mile north of the tower.

Here is a matching StreetView looking south from Chestnut & 9th Street: 

 
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