American Fiction|Longfellow Bridge — The Crossing Between Two Names

Every version of Monk Ellison is a commute. There is Thelonious Ellison, the novelist nobody buys, and there is Stagg R. Leigh, the invented ex-convict whose deliberately terrible book everybody wants. The film keeps him moving between them, and Boston gives it the right piece of infrastructure: the Longfellow Bridge, eleven granite arches over the Charles from Beacon Hill to Kendall Square, which location guides list among the picture's shooting sites.

Bostonians call it the Salt-and-Pepper Bridge, after the four stone towers mid-span that look like cruet sets. It opened in 1906, carries the Red Line down the middle, and was stripped back to its steel and rebuilt between 2013 and 2018 — every piece of granite numbered, lifted, cleaned and put back. On one bank you have the gold dome and the brick of Beacon Hill; on the other, the glass of Kendall Square and the labs. Two economies, two vocabularies, eight hundred metres apart. A man travelling under a false name could not ask for a better set.

Walk it, do not drive it. The downstream footway gives you the whole basin: sailing dinghies from Community Boating, the Esplanade running west, planes turning over Logan behind you. Time it for the last twenty minutes of light, when a Red Line train comes across lit from inside and the towers go black against the water. That is the shot, and the MBTA runs it for you every four minutes.

Photo: Longfellow Bridge reflected in the Charles River, Boston (Pexels, free licence).