One would expect a place with the hype of Boston to be far less unique than the beloved city happens to be. Whatever you’ve heard about Boston, it’s true — the big-bellied Red Sox barflies, the hippie-cum-yuppie-foodies, the strong historical shadow, the supreme collegetown vibe forever fighting the townies, the lovely Boston lagers, I mean all of it — and in fact, despite multiple visitations, Boston continues to delight me.

The scape of the city is recognosable well beyond the numerous iconic neighbourhoods, and despite the incredible variety of its residents, Bostonians exhude a certain, not entirely unwelcome mojo. The city crawls with their escapades and their hangouts (a priveledge granted exclusively to places urbanised on such a walkable scale); even for a true city as surprisingly small as Boston, the anteceding culture is unexpectedly dense enough that the neighbourhoods themselves might as well be their own city-states for all the fierce loyalty the inspire.  My most recent venture lasted a mere weekend and still I managed to amble through just about every quarter in search of the full Boston story.

The Boston I know is full of fairly conservative art, a healthy dose of wealth and all that entails, and die-hard sports buffs. It’s all cold weather and humble history. But the Boston I witnessed firsthand on this spin through the area was the Boston of comminist t-shirts, marijuana music festivals, and pirate cabarets. It was the Boston of stuffed French Toast, of microbrews, of Newberry Comics, of an impressive public library, in short just the type of off-the-cuff complexity you want in a repeat visit. Sure there’s that romantic Boston, the one filled with old-world architecture and strolling parks, apple cider at the farmers market, and “pak the kaa in Haavad yad” but to rely on a textbook image of Boston is to discredit the adaptive ability the region has, making the Boston of yesteryear just as poignant as the Boston of today. It’s not the cobblestones or the quaint churches but the way they are side by side with shutter shades and breakdancers, where English Premiere League fans and Patriots fans are vying for the same territory, where diner-dripping cream pies are just as likely to be accompanied by 19 cent coffee as by a 12 dollar cocktail.

Let’s not forget that Boston has a long history supporting such diversity: even the 1920 immigrant version of Boston had subcultures in spades, a cournicopia which, though perhaps only tolerated back then, has been wholeheartedly embraced today. The result? Same old authentic Italian-American fare and Irish pubs a-pleanty, but you’ll no longer incite anyone’s emnity from frequenting both, nor from sampling the Ethiopian, Nepalese, or Chinese so abundant in the city.  Back then like stuck to like, and playdates were easily accepted or denied based on who attended which church, but today it seems hard to imagine a Boston without the black coat-clad assertively vocal aetheists or the Kamboucha-swigging mystics on their way to Bihkram Yoga practice. While other, maybe even more worldly metroplises (New York, Los Angeles, Paris, et al) claim to host the same spectrum of personalities, to do so in a place with as big a pool as NYC or LA is a feat not nearly so admirable as when Boston pulls the same off wih a mere 1.4 million people and 12.9 kilometer reach.

That’s the real power of Boston; it’s kept up with the changing American face. Just as our grandparents and great grandparents needed it back then to usher in their Dream, so too did we need it to pop up international businesses and engineering schools and hipster bookshops to foster our own Dream. We needed it to keep that real-world, salt-of-the-earth feel but grow some skyscrapers and new-money boutiques and restaurants to cover up the spots the 1950s left bald. Luckily, Boston, being the giving spirit she is, obliged and kept Boston very much alive.