American Fiction|Congress and A Streets, Fort Point — The Boston Cord Jefferson Insisted On

Cord Jefferson set one rule for shooting his first film in Boston: no Fenway Park, no duck boats on the Charles. He was making a picture about a man punished for refusing to deliver the expected version of himself, and he was not about to deliver the expected version of a city. So the crew went to Fort Point and set up on the corner of Congress and A Streets.

This is the old wool district. In the late nineteenth century the Boston Wharf Company threw up block after block of brick warehouses here on filled land, all of them built to the same sober pattern — flat facades, granite lintels, heavy loading doors, six floors of storage above a channel full of barges. The wool left. The artists arrived in the 1970s and were mostly priced out again after 2010. What stands now is a strange, legible layering: century-old brick on three corners and glass towers rising immediately behind it, the Fort Point Channel a block away, the harbour smell still getting through.

Stand at the intersection and turn a slow circle. Nothing here announces Boston. There is no landmark in the frame to tell you what city you are in, which is exactly the point — this is a place doing its ordinary work, photographed by someone who wanted it that way. Then walk two minutes east to the channel and look back at the warehouse wall from the water side. The scale of what the wool trade built is easier to feel from there.

Photo: historic brick buildings meeting modern towers in Boston (Pexels, free licence) — illustrative of the Fort Point streetscape.