Love Story
“Love means never having to say you're sorry.” A Harvard hockey player and a Radcliffe musician — the weepie that defined a generation, shot in the Yard.
Harvard
Boston in Culture
The city you already know
Before you ever visit, you’ve met Boston somewhere — a bench in the Public Garden, a bar where everybody knows your name, an eighth-inning singalong at Fenway, a monkey named George who, it turns out, is from Cambridge. Here is the city as the screen, the radio and the page gave it to you — 69 of them, tied to the real places they happened. The easiest way in.
▣ On screen 21
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Robert Mitchum as a small-time Boston gunrunner — the granddaddy of the city's crime films, gray and cold and perfect.
Boston
The Verdict
Paul Newman as a washed-up Boston lawyer chasing one last case — a courthouse classic shot in the city's old legal heart.
Boston courts
Glory
The 54th Massachusetts — the Black regiment whose memorial stands across from the State House. The bronze is real; you can visit the men it honors.
Shaw Memorial, Boston Common
Good Will Hunting
“It's not your fault.” The bench where Sean and Will sit is in the Public Garden — written by two local kids, Affleck and Damon, who grew up a few streets apart in Cambridge.
Public Garden · South Boston
Mystic River
Three boyhood friends, one neighborhood, the long shadow of a single afternoon — Lehane's Boston at its most haunted, and two Oscars for it.
East Boston · the river
The Departed
Scorsese's Boston of moles and mobsters won Best Picture — scored, unforgettably, to the Dropkick Murphys' “I'm Shipping Up to Boston.”
South Boston
Gone Baby Gone
Dennis Lehane's Dorchester, cast with real neighborhood faces — a missing-child story that argues about what loyalty to a place really costs.
Dorchester
21
The true-ish story of the MIT students who counted cards and took Vegas for millions — genius applied to blackjack.
MIT
The Town
A heist and a love story under the Bunker Hill Monument — Affleck's ode to the one square mile that once produced more bank robbers than anywhere in America.
Charlestown
The Fighter
Micky Ward and his brother Dicky, out of working-class Lowell — two Oscars, and the most Massachusetts boxing movie ever made.
Lowell
The Social Network
It opens in a bar near Harvard Yard and ends with a company that ate the world. The dorm where it began is a short walk away.
Harvard
Shutter Island
Lehane again, Scorsese again — a 1950s asylum on an island in the harbor you can actually take a ferry to.
Boston Harbor Islands
Ted
A foul-mouthed teddy bear with the thickest Boston accent ever committed to film — MacFarlane's love letter to the city he's from.
Boston Common · Back Bay
Spotlight
The Best Picture about the Globe reporters who broke the Catholic Church abuse story — journalism as civic duty, told block by Boston block.
The Boston Globe
Black Mass
Johnny Depp as Whitey Bulger — the FBI informant who ran Southie for two decades while the Bureau looked away.
South Boston
Patriots Day
The 2013 Marathon bombing and the manhunt that followed — and the moment a wounded city decided it would not be cowed.
Boylston Street
Manchester by the Sea
Grief in a small North Shore town, in winter — Casey Affleck's Oscar, and the most quietly devastating film New England has produced.
Cape Ann
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott's March sisters, shot where she wrote them — Concord and the towns around it, in every season.
Concord
Knives Out
A whodunit in a New England mansion, with Daniel Craig's gloriously bad Southern accent and a very Massachusetts sense of inherited money.
Greater Boston
CODA
A fishing family on the North Shore and the hearing daughter who sings — the first film with a deaf lead cast to win Best Picture.
Gloucester
◷ On television 12
Cheers
“Where everybody knows your name.” The bar at 84 Beacon Street — the Bull & Finch Pub — became the most famous tavern in television.
Beacon Hill
St. Elsewhere
The gritty Boston hospital drama that rewrote what television could do — and ended with the most argued-about finale in the medium's history.
Boston
Spenser: For Hire
Robert B. Parker's Boston private eye, on location all over the city — the show that taught a generation what the Back Bay looked like.
Boston
Frasier
The doctor left the Boston bar for Seattle radio — and the spinoff won more Emmys than almost any comedy in history.
from Cheers
Ally McBeal
The dancing baby, the unisex bathroom, and a Boston law firm that put the city on every TV in the '90s.
Boston
Boston Legal
James Spader and William Shatner as the city's most theatrical lawyers — David E. Kelley's Boston, all balconies and closing arguments.
Boston
Fringe
A fictional Harvard lab, parallel universes, and a very Boston kind of mad science — five seasons of the city as the edge of the possible.
Harvard · Boston
Rizzoli & Isles
A Boston homicide detective and the medical examiner who's her best friend — Tess Gerritsen's crime novels, made for television.
Boston
SMILF
Frankie Shaw's single mother scraping by in Southie — a rare look at the neighborhood from the kitchen table, not the bar.
South Boston
City on a Hill
Affleck and Damon's portrait of corrupt, cold-war-era Boston — the “Boston miracle” of the '90s, told from the gutter up.
1990s Boston
Defending Jacob
A suburban Massachusetts family torn apart when the son is accused of murder — quiet, affluent, and quietly terrifying.
Newton
Julia
Julia Child taught America to cook from a Cambridge kitchen and a Boston public-TV studio — and this series brings both back to life.
Cambridge · WGBH
♪ In song 13
Charlie on the M.T.A.
The protest song about a fare hike that trapped poor Charlie underground forever — and the reason Boston's transit card is the CharlieCard.
The Boston subway
Dirty Water
“Down by the banks of the River Charles…” Blasted after every Bruins and Red Sox win — a love song to a river that wasn't always clean.
The Charles River
Sweet Caroline
“So good! So good! So good!” In the middle of the eighth inning at Fenway, 37,000 strangers become one chorus. There is no more Boston sound.
Fenway Park
Roadrunner
Jonathan Richman singing about the Stop & Shop with the radio on — perennially proposed as the official rock song of Massachusetts.
Route 128
Dream On
Aerosmith formed in an apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Ave — Steven Tyler's first ballad, written before anyone was listening.
Boston
Please Come to Boston
“Please come to Boston for the springtime…” A wanderer's plea that made the city sound like the place you'd give anything to be.
Boston
More Than a Feeling
Tom Scholz built the sound in a Watertown basement on gear he engineered himself — an MIT grad who made one of rock's biggest debuts alone.
Watertown
Just What I Needed
The Cars came up through the Rat in Kenmore Square — new wave, engineered to perfection, straight out of the Boston club scene.
Boston
Centerfold
“Na na na na…” The J. Geils Band were Boston's own bar-band kings before they topped the world charts.
Boston
Fast Car
Tracy Chapman busked in Harvard Square while studying at Tufts. The song she wrote there has outlived nearly everything around it.
Harvard Square
Step by Step
Five kids from Dorchester became the biggest boy band on earth — boy-band pop was, briefly, a Boston export.
Dorchester
More Than Words
A Malden band's acoustic ballad that went to number one — proof Boston rock could be tender when it wanted to.
Boston
I'm Shipping Up to Boston
Woody Guthrie's lost lyrics, Celtic-punk fury, and a city's working heart — the sound of Boston walking out to a fight it intends to win.
South Boston
❦ On the page 8
The Scarlet Letter
Hester Prynne on the scaffold in Puritan Boston — Hawthorne's reckoning with the city's founding severity, and American literature's first great novel.
Puritan Boston
Walden
Two years in a cabin by a pond outside Concord became the founding text of American environmentalism. The pond is still there, still swimmable.
Concord
Little Women
Written at Orchard House in Concord, where you can still stand in the room — the March sisters were Alcott's own family, barely disguised.
Concord
Make Way for Ducklings
Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings cross to the Public Garden lagoon — and the bronze statues of them are the most-hugged in the city.
Boston Public Garden
Curious George
The Reys fled Paris by bicycle with the manuscript and settled in Cambridge. The most curious monkey in literature is, by adoption, a local.
Cambridge
Johnny Tremain
A silversmith's apprentice swept into the Revolution — the novel that taught generations of American children what 1775 felt like from the street.
Revolutionary Boston
The Spenser Novels
Forty books of a wisecracking Boston PI who quotes poetry and orders at the Bristol Lounge — Parker mapped the city one case at a time.
Boston
Infinite Jest
A thousand pages set in a near-future Boston of tennis academies and halfway houses — the most ambitious novel the city has ever hosted.
Greater Boston
◇ Sports & legend 7
The Boston Marathon
The world's oldest annual marathon, run every Patriots' Day since 1897 — up Heartbreak Hill and down Boylston, where a million people line the curb.
Hopkinton to Boylston Street
Bobby Orr Flies
Orr scores the Cup-winner and is tripped into the air, arms out, parallel to the ice. The most famous photograph in hockey is a Boston photograph.
Boston Garden
Fisk Waves It Fair
Game 6 of the '75 Series, past midnight: Fisk hits it down the line and waves with both arms, willing it fair. It stayed fair. So did the image, forever.
Fenway Park
Larry Legend
Larry Bird and the parquet floor of the old Garden — three titles, a rivalry with Magic that saved the NBA, and the hick from French Lick made Boston royalty.
Boston Garden
The Hail Mary
Doug Flutie's last-second bomb to beat Miami — the “Flutie Effect” that made Boston College a household name and a generation of applicants.
Boston College
The Curse Reversed
Down 0–3 to the Yankees, the Red Sox won eight straight and a first title in 86 years. Grown adults wept in the street. Some still do.
Fenway Park
“This Is Our City”
Days after the Marathon bombing, Ortiz took the Fenway mic and said the unprintable, unforgettable thing. The city exhaled, and went on.
Fenway Park
★ Boston-made 8
Julia Child
She taught America to cook from a Cambridge kitchen so beloved the Smithsonian moved the whole room to Washington. Bon appétit, from Massachusetts.
Cambridge
Leonard Nimoy
Spock was born in Boston's West End, the son of immigrants, and shined shoes on the streets there. The most logical man in the galaxy is a Boston kid.
West End
Donna Summer
Before she ruled the disco era, LaDonna Gaines sang in church in Boston. The Queen of Disco grew up here.
Mission Hill · Dorchester
Conan O'Brien
Brookline kid, Harvard Lampoon president, late-night institution — the tallest, palest export of Greater Boston comedy.
Brookline
Damon & Affleck
Two kids from the same Cambridge streets who wrote themselves an Oscar with Good Will Hunting — and keep coming home to film the city.
Cambridge
Aerosmith
“The Bad Boys from Boston” formed in a cramped apartment on Comm Ave and became the best-selling American hard-rock band in history.
Commonwealth Avenue
Mark Wahlberg
From Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch to Oscar nominee — the youngest of nine kids from Dorchester who became one of Boston's most relentless ambassadors.
Dorchester
New Edition
Bobby Brown, Bobby Brown, Ralph Tresvant and the rest came up in the Orchard Park projects of Roxbury — the blueprint for every boy band that followed.
Roxbury
The city on screen is only the beginning. Walk the Innovation Trail →