In Depth

Boston embodies contrasts and contradictions -- blueblood and blue collar, Yankee and Irish, Brahmin banker and budget-conscious graduate student. It's home to the country's first public school and to a problematic educational system. A proud seaport, it's reclaiming its harbor from crippling pollution. It's a one-time hotbed of abolitionism with an intractable reputation for racism. And although it's a magnet for college students from all over the world and others engaged in intellectual pursuits, the traditional, parochial obsessions are "sports, politics, and revenge."

Boston is a living landmark that bears many marks of its colonial heritage, but where it's theoretically possible (this is an observation, not a suggestion) to spend days without going near anything built before 1960, or even going outdoors. How did it get this way?

Boston Today

The early 21st century found Boston where it had been at the turns of the first 3 centuries of its existence: in the middle of a transformation. As the 1700s dawned, the town was growing into one of the colonies' most important commercial centers; 100 years later, flush with post-Revolutionary prosperity, it was growing into a city. The end of the 19th century saw the rise of the "Athens of America" and the rich cultural tradition that endures today in the Museum of Fine Arts, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Public Library, among other institutions.

Today you'll find a metropolis of 559,034 at the heart of the Greater Boston area, which encompasses 83 cities and towns and some 4 million people. The hospitals and medical centers are among the best in the world, and the ongoing health-care revolution is a hot topic. Education and tourism are pillars of the local economy, which has mirrored national trends (positive and negative) in unemployment statistics. Though hardly recession-proof, the banking, financial services, and insurance industries are important components as well. The heart of downtown is cleaning up after an unprecedented -- in technique as well as budget -- highway reconstruction.

Welcome Home -- As they have for more than a century, immigrants flock to the Boston area, where Irish, eastern European Jewish, Italian, Portuguese, African American, Latino, West Indian, and, most recently, Asian arrivals have made their homes and made their mark. Between 1990 and 2000, the city's Asian population nearly doubled, and the Latino population grew by more than one-third.

One pastime that has traditionally united many immigrants is rooting for the city's professional sports teams. The New England Patriots, who play in a distant suburb, triumphed in the Super Bowl in 2002, 2004, and 2005 -- only to find that their third title was virtually a footnote. Three months earlier, in October 2004, the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since 1918. Nearly four years later, their fans are still (no kidding) burning off 86 years of pent-up frustration. For fans of pro basketball and hockey, there's good news -- tickets to the Celtics and Bruins are no longer as hard to come by as they were during those teams' glory days.

Construction Ahead -- The most prominent feature of downtown Boston is not an architectural masterpiece or a natural wonder but the remains of an enormous construction site. The $14.6 billion Big Dig began in 1988 and technically ended with the demolition of the final piece of the old elevated expressway in 2006 -- but construction on the surface is dragging on. The Big Dig transformed downtown Boston by hiding I-93 underground; now the newly revealed land will hold green space, buildings, and smaller surface roads. The project's most visible symbol, the Leonard P. Zakim-Bunker Hill Bridge, is the eye-catching white structure that spans the Charles River north of downtown.

With the bulk of the project complete, Boston has, in a sense, come full circle. Now that the worst of the traffic is hidden away, the pedestrians who originally owned the city once again have easy access to the harbor, and the center of commerce opens onto the waterfront much as it did 3 centuries ago.