In the same year that the Boston Red Sox made history by winning the World Series, Steven Spielberg decided to destroy Boston as one of the center pieces apparently of his new film War of the Worlds.
Spielberg apparently picked Boston as the American substitute to London, which H.G. Wells made the focus in the 1898 novel upon which the movie is based.
But if Spielberg actually shot any scenes in the most English of American cities, I've heard no tale.
The city center used for filming in late October/ early November was a section of Newark near Ferry Street. But since the main character played by Tom Cruise is a longshoreman living in the Iron Bound section of Newark, we must assume that this sequence is part of the early arrival of the invaders from space associated with the scenes of home life filmed near the Bayonne Bridge (which is featured in the Superbowl trailer) and not a depiction of Boston.
As in the film Jurassic Park, the main character carting his two kids is fleeing from the aliens and headed towards some presumed place of safety.
The hero apparently heads with the kids to the home of his estranged wife - filmed in Howell Township. But it is unclear at this point whether or not he arrives there through a series of adventures that take in some of the other filmed locations. I suspect the shots at the ex-wife's home is the next step in an ever escalating series of adventures, and the fictional location may indeed be in the suburbs of Boston - accounting for Cruise's arrival so far north of his origin in Newark.
One small inside joke or perhaps coincidence is the fact that the house used for the fiction wife is located on Cranbury Way in Howell, a possible homage to the 1939 radio broadcast that had the aliens landing at Grover's Mill - a short ride west on Howell - located on Cranbury Lane.
Since the Staten Island shoot along Route 440 depicts the massive exodus of people out of burning Boston, we might rightly assume that this would be the logical next step in the sequence of adventures - after Cruise and kids escape the lively alien red weed in the woods nearby. Descriptions of the Staten Island scene indicate a build up of intensity rather than the later desperate developments that we find in the Athens shoot - and is the first step of Cruise's flight to some new perceived destination of safety that takes him to the ferry crossing later, the concrete factory in Connecticut and scenes perhaps of more open combat filmed in places like Virginia.
Such a flight from danger to danger seems to preclude the need of having Cruise's character trampng through the Boston Common. Yet Spielberg, apparently, had played with the idea of having some shots done in Boston - or rather a Boston-like setting, which appears to have been the north section of Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
Perhaps Spielberg found Boston too expensive a place to shoot or two unwieldy, and remembered his Beatles days filming in a section of New York he knew had the look and feel of the Revolutionary War city 500 miles to the north.
To this end, Spielberg apparently contemplated duplicating some aspect of Boston, creating a Revolutionary War statue similar to those found near the Boston Common, and placed in on a curving road just south east and below the Litchfield Villa and near enough to Grand Army Plaza to evoke the necessary mood.
What changed his mind remains a mystery. Perhaps lack of shooting time, screen time or another inspiration, soon had Spielberg abort the shoot, order crews to pack up the statue and send it to studios in Los Angeles where it may or may not be used in the final film as part of prop in a sound stage - only the June 29 premier will tell us for sure.