Three decker houses with stacked porches ring Fields Corner, where Gone Baby Gone filmed the McCready family home.
What Dorchester looks like
Adams Street meets at an X shaped intersection in , the neighborhood's commercial spine. Three storey apartment buildings ring the corner, their ground floors lined with storefronts and a cluster of restaurants serving Vietnamese pho near the subway entrance. Buses wait at the curb outside the station, its glass and steel canopy covering the platform at the end of the block.
Away from the corner, the streets are rows of three decker houses stacked with porches one above the other. Porch columns come square, round or fluted. Their capitals run Doric, Ionic or Corinthian. The roofs above them run to mansards, pediments or cone shaped gables. The houses mostly date from the 1870s to the early 1900s.
On , bow fronted brick blocks turn the corner in matching cornices, cars parked along both curbs the length of the block. Farther south in Port Norfolk, is a small green triangle with a flagpole, boxed in by wood frame houses behind chain link fences.
Dorchester Avenue runs the length of the neighborhood past , where a white clapboard parish church stands behind an iron fence with its steeple over the rooftops. A rusted footbridge crosses the Fairmount Line east of the avenue, close to where the Four Corners and Talbot Avenue stations opened after 2012.
Shot in Dorchester
For Gone Baby Gone, the production used 21 Pond Street in North Dorchester as the home of the missing girl's family. Director Ben Affleck also shot exteriors of the surrounding houses around Fields Corner and up and down Dorchester Avenue.
Gone Baby Gone, 2007
The missing girl Amanda McCready's family lived at this address in North Dorchester. The production also filmed exteriors of nearby houses around Fields Corner and along Dorchester Avenue. Street View
What Dorchester can double for
Elmwood in Providence, Rhode Island
Elmwood is a Late Victorian district of dense multi family houses on a triangular street grid, put up from the 1870s for the same industrial workforce Dorchester's three decker street housed. The porch stacking and turned columns read the same on camera. Elmwood's blocks run narrower and sit closer to Broad Street's commercial strip, so a wide establishing shot needs to keep clear of the busier corners. Try searching Late Victorian three decker street now.
Vernon Hill in Worcester, Massachusetts
Worcester is credited as the likely origin of the three decker house, and Vernon Hill's residential streets show the same stacked porches and clapboard siding. The scale and massing match Dorchester closely. Worcester's hillier terrain puts a visible grade under the sidewalks that Dorchester's flatter streets do not share. Try searching Worcester three decker street now.
