Actors Ben Affleck and Rebecca Hall in a community garden in “The Town”

(L-r) Rebecca Hall as Claire Keesey and Ben Affleck as Doug MacRay in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ crime drama ‘The Town,’ distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. Photo by Claire Folger

It’s a Boston community garden but which one?

Excerpt from a review in the Observer by Phillip French
Sept 26, 2010

Based on a novel by Chuck Hogan called Prince of Thieves, Ben Affleck’s The Town is a violent crime story set in the Charlestown area of north-east Boston, which boasts more bank and armoured car robbers than any other square mile in America. Forty years ago one might have been surprised by this, as to outsiders Boston was thought of as a sedate city, rich in revolutionary history and the setting for respectable novels of upper-class manners.

“The Town” movie scene with Ben Affleck and Jeremy Renner

But in the early 1970s the city became the stamping ground for the tough private eye Spenser, an east coast version of Philip Marlowe created by the prolific Robert B Parker, and the location for The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the first of 25 novels about crime and law enforcement by George V Higgins, assistant US attorney for the district of Massachusetts. “What I can’t get over is that so good a first novel was written by the fuzz,” Norman Mailer wrote, and in the gritty movie version Robert Mitchum played the doomed Irish-American informer in a world where the lawyers, the cops and the crooks speak the same colourfully obscene language, have similar ethics and respect shared tribal loyalties.

The complete review here.

Boston’s Community Gardens

Boston has 150 active community gardens. Created from vacant or unused land by residents, these gardens vary in size and use. They span from communally-maintained pocket parks to gardens of separately cultivated vegetable plots serving over 10,000 people – school children to the elderly, new comers to longtime residents, singles to families.

As a community garden owner, Boston Natural Areas Network (BNAN) preserves open space, and provides services including garden ownership, land management and open space stewardship, and serves as an information and educational clearinghouse. Boston’s community gardening system, supported with adequate garden infrastructure, volunteer garden leadership and garden support groups such as BNAN, are a proven sustainable approach to actively growing fresh and healthy food in Boston. For more information, visit www.bostonnatural.org or call 617.542.7696.

See locations of Boston gardens here.