Quote:
Originally Posted by Sun Belt
Maybe the OP can help us zero in on the right type of neighborhood.
Blue collar, upper middle class, or elite?
Parts of Boston are very bourgeois, other parts are gritty - same goes for Chicago.
This is very much Boston, just as much as Beacon Hill is. This location is just 6 miles from downtown. Surely there are many parts of Chicago that look like this:
https://goo.gl/maps/Zq6tu6q9FHvbaWC66k
Saugus: about 7 miles from Boston, major arterial road into downtown.
https://goo.gl/maps/jZ3dQBPaaYXtx5Kj6
This is in Boston, next to a commuter rail station, equipped with a drive-thru Dunkin'. Certainly Chicago has similar stuff near a Metra Station?
https://goo.gl/maps/UG1HNwwjvEuP7HnN8
North Quincy [pronounced Kwinzee], at a Red Line T station. Heck the Red Line goes to Harvard Square. Great shots here. The Red Line is in many films, usually going over the Longfellow Bridge though.
https://goo.gl/maps/T6UeNMmmGPvUErjJ6
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You could hardly have found more unprepossessing shots of Boston if you tried real hard, like scraping the bottom of the baked bean pot.
I think that the OP suggested some views of more urbane interface in the older districts that could play off each other, chicago for Boston/Cambridge and vice-versa. Some of what was posted above looks really good to me.
Of course, the triple deckers clad in wood or vinyl are a New England feature that multiplied on a vast street grid don't mesh with Chicago. Around Harvard Square, the stone and brick buildings that resemble Chicago's are on the main arterials. A lot of the frat houses outside the main campus of Harvard U are colonial type clapboard houses, and some date back to colonial times indeed.
I think the trick is to stick to main commercial streets, and the winding Chicago streets posted above are pretty good.
I worked on a movie set in Boston but entirely shot in Montreal in 2001 (Heist/David Mamet). The Southie type neighborhood we used was Pointe St-Charles, the closest equivalent in atmosphere in human terms since this was an old Irish working class part of town. The housing typology is totally different, Montreal is heavily bricked with interspersed clapboard. The exterior shots around a jewelry shop in Old Montreal had more of the look and feel of downtown Boston because that part of town has very similar architecture throughout.
You oftentimes need to help establish settings with visual cues like signage or street furniture to fake it in a good way.