Boston

DISCRIPTION OF DOWNTOWN AND GREATER BOSTON

Few cities offer such a broad selection of neighborhoods as diverse in appearance, character and characteristics as the population that inhabits them as Boston, by virtue of its constant development, expansion and reinvention since its founding in 1630 by Puritans escaping religious persecution from the Church of England. Named for an English town where many of them hailed from, Boston retains traces of all of its phases of growth from intimate village to small town to bustling metropolis, all with first-rate real estate for high-style city life of any style. Winding, narrow streets from Boston’s Colonial days remain in the North End, complemented by era landmarks on the Freedom Trail such as the Paul Revere House and Old North Church, as well as an abbondanza of Italian ristorantes and caffes. The classical formality of Boston’s Federal and Greek Revival periods is well preserved in Beacon Hill’s stately townhouses. The Victorian era lives on in the stately brick bowfront rowhouses around English oval squares in the South End and the mansard-roofed French Academic brownstones of the Back Bay, built on landfill to expand the city’s footprint. Classical Revival abounds in the turn-of-the-20th-century Fenway, complementing the music at Symphony Hall and the art in the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, while throwing in a little baseball in Fenway Park for good measure. Boston’s factory-warehouse-shipping industries of yore and high-tech business-science world of today intermingle on the Waterfront, Fort Point Channel, and the city’s newest neighborhood, the Seaport District, where nightlife is hip and heavy. A rich diversity of styles and ethnicities permeates Boston’s “streetcar suburbs”— Allston, Brighton, Charlestown, Dorchester, East Boston, Hyde Park, Jamaica Plain, Mattapan, Mission Hill, Roslindale, Roxbury, South Boston, West Roxbury. Even Downtown Crossing, Boston’s central business district, and its adjacent Financial District is sprouting condominiums, putting work steps from home. A comprehensive network of buses and trains interconnects all of these neighborhoods, knitting Boston’s disparate parts into a well-connected whole, while providing connections to some of the nation’s finest educational institutions—Harvard and MIT in Cambridge and Northeastern and Wentworth in the Fenway, to name a few—as well as some of the nation’s fastest-growing biotech and life sciences industries providing thousands of jobs. The Commuter Rail, Amtrak, and Logan Airport connect Boston to the entire world. For lifestyle choice and growth potential unprecedented, come to Boston.