With its Puritan roots and intellectual reputation (although Harvard, America’s oldest university, is actually across the Charles River in Cambridge) Boston has long been seen as New York’s stuffy little bluestocking sister. Yet a multicultural population and major regeneration projects set in motion in the 1990s have reinvented it as a dynamic metropolis.

The birthplace of American Independence draws hordes of tourists to the scene of that none-too-polite tea party. And, while the...
[Boston guide]