Off the Bricks

Pack 10 · FREE

Boston Movie Filming Locations: A Self-Guided Walking Hunt

Every Boston movie fan knows the front of the bar from Cheers. Fewer know that the room you watched for eleven years was a soundstage in Hollywood, and the real pub's basement doesn't look much like it. That's the pattern this walk is built on: Boston plays itself from the outside, and the insides get built somewhere cheaper.

Shot Here is a self-guided walking hunt through Boston's real film and TV locations. It starts at Government Center, at the concrete building The Departed turned into a police headquarters, and climbs over Beacon Hill to the house Thomas Crown came home to and the old firehouse that fire historians say a TV detective moved into. Then it drops down to Beacon Street and the Public Garden - the Cheers steps, Make Way for Ducklings in bronze, and the Good Will Hunting bench, which has no sign and doesn't need one. From the top of the Common it heads downtown, past a penthouse that's really a library and a gold door a student paper ties to Thomas Crown's bank job, to the square that played a video-game city and old New York, and out to the harbor.

Each stop is a riddle that walks you to the next location, and the answer is something you can only get by looking: a name on a building, a number over a door, a word in bronze. Then you get the story - what was filmed there, what wasn't, and where the famous version is wrong.

We stick to places you can stand on a public sidewalk at any hour, and to facts we can source: the American Film Institute's catalog, the Boston Globe, American Cinematographer, Boston.com, the Boston Fire Historical Society, Mass Humanities, the National Park Service. Every source is listed. Where sources disagree, we say so. No stills, no scripts, no spoilers beyond what the street already gives away.

Thirteen stops, about two and three-quarter hours and five and a half kilometers, with a one-hour short cut through Beacon Hill and the Public Garden. Part of Off the Bricks: Boston Hunts.

The whole walk is free in the app.

Boston filming locations, and what was really shot somewhere else

Route

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Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

  • The whole walk

    175 MIN · 5.6 KM · 13 STOPS

  • The short cut: Beacon Hill to the Common

    65 MIN · 2.2 KM · 6 STOPS

    The firehouse fire historians say played Spenser's home, the Cheers door, the ducklings, the Good Will Hunting bench, Glory's memorial and The Departed's penthouse, in about an hour, downhill and then across the Common.

Stop 01 · West End

The Departed's police headquarters was built for the state's employment office.

The Departed's State Police headquarters was never a police building. In the 2006 film this concrete complex plays the outside of the special investigations unit, and Boston.com and Suffolk University's student paper both name the Hurley Building, the half of the block nearer Cambridge Street. The state built it for its Division of Employment Security, later used it for labor and workforce offices, and says it is now empty. The other half, the Erich Lindemann Mental Health Center, still houses the Department of Mental Health. Paul Rudolph sketched the whole Government Service Center as one plan in 1962; it was never fully built, and both buildings were finished by 1971. The most Boston movie of its decade is also a remake of a Hong Kong film, Infernal Affairs (2002), adapted by Dorchester-born William Monahan, and it won four Oscars. The live story here is real estate: the state took redevelopment offers for the block until September 18, 2026, and says they are under review. Look at the concrete stair that climbs from the Staniford Street sidewalk to the plaza.

Look now

Find the concrete stair that climbs from the Staniford Street sidewalk up to the plaza.

Read more
Lindemann-Hurley Redevelopment (DCAMM)

Stop 02 · Beacon Hill

Thomas Crown came home to a house Bulfinch built for a future mayor.

Thomas Crown's front door is on Beacon Hill, and many of his movie's rooms were in Hollywood. In The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Crown is a wealthy Bostonian who masterminds a bank robbery, and the Boston Globe's list of Boston film locations puts his home here, at 85 Mount Vernon. The American Film Institute's catalog says the movie was shot mostly on location around Boston between June and September 1967 - ninety locations in ten weeks, by the studio's count - but many interiors were filmed at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood. The FBI refused to help, saying the script made the bureau look incompetent. The real house has a better cast list. Charles Bulfinch designed it for Harrison Gray Otis, built in 1801, the second of three houses he drew for the family; Historic New England says they lived here only five years. Otis went on to be Boston's third mayor, in 1829. When Hollywood remade the movie in 1999, it moved the story to New York.

Look now

Notice how the house stands alone, back from the street, while its neighbors crowd the sidewalk.

Read more
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) - AFI Catalog

Pit stops

  • Warm up inside · NEAR STOP 08
    Boston Common Visitor Information Center, 139 Tremont Street
    Indoor visitor center by Park Street station. Meet Boston lists it open daily 8:30 a.m. to 4:45 p.m.; check before you go.
    Meet Boston (Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau)
  • Restroom · NEAR STOP 11
    Faneuil Hall (National Park Service)
    Public restrooms and drinking water, per the Park Service. Check posted hours.
    National Park Service (Boston NHP)
  • Restroom · NEAR STOP 13
    South Station
    Station restrooms are under construction through late November 2026; the MBTA lists temporary restrooms along Atlantic Avenue.
    MBTA

66 sources