Hey, that was then!
In the 19th Century, the Old Corner Bookstore, in downtown Boston, became a gathering place for writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. Here James Russell Lowell edited the first editions of The Atlantic Monthly.
“Boston - wrinkled, spindly-legged, depleted of nearly all her spiritual and cutaneous oils, provincial, self-esteeming - has gone on spending and spending her inflated bills of pure reputation, decade after decade.”
xxx
“Harvard (across the river in Cambridge) and Boston are two ends of one mustache. ... Without the faculty, the visitors, the events that Harvard brings to the life here, Boston would be intolerable to anyone except genealogists, antique dealers, and those who find repletion in a closed local society.’’
— Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007), American literary critic and novelist
Gay Pride parade in Boston