Explore Boston · Part One
Boston Right Now
A compact city with an outsized reach: who lives here, what pays the bills, and what two decades of rebuilding changed.
Boston is easy to underestimate on paper and hard to underestimate in person. It’s a walkable city of brick and harbor that also holds one of the country’s densest clusters of hospitals, universities, labs, and money, and it has spent 20 years rebuilding its middle without losing its old bones.
The shape of the city
The 2020 Census counted 675,647 Bostonians, and the Census Bureau’s estimate for July 1, 2025, was 672,973, a shade smaller than El Paso or Las Vegas. That undersells the place: the metro area that commutes, studies, and sees its doctors here held about 5 million people in the same estimates.
It all fits on about 48 square miles of land, and much of Back Bay, the South End, and the Seaport sits on fill laid down in the 1800s and early 1900s. Most outer neighborhoods were once separate towns, annexed between 1868 and 1912, when Hyde Park joined last. Brookline declined. Cambridge, home to Harvard and MIT, is its own city across the river.
What pays the bills
The economy rests on institutions that don’t move. Mass General Brigham, the hospital system built on Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s, is the state’s largest private employer, and the Longwood Medical Area packs hospitals and research towers into a few hundred acres. Dozens of colleges sit inside city limits; every September, you’ll feel it.
Life sciences grew from that research, centered on MIT’s Kendall Square across the river and spreading to the Seaport, where Vertex Pharmaceuticals moved its headquarters in 2014. Money is the old-line trade: Massachusetts Investors Trust, the first American mutual fund, opened here in 1924. The harbor still works, with New England’s largest container terminal, a cruise port, and the Boston Fish Pier, open since 1914 and the nation’s oldest continuously working fish pier.
A new middle, a new waterfront
For about half a century the elevated Central Artery walled downtown off from the North End and the water. The Big Dig buried it: the new tunnels opened in 2003, the old steel came down, and the project formally closed at the end of 2007. In its place grew the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a 1.5-mile ribbon of parks that opened in 2008.
Across Fort Point Channel, the South Boston waterfront went from parking lots to skyline in a generation, led by the ICA’s harborside museum in 2006 and Mayor Thomas Menino’s Innovation District push. Locals debate whether the Seaport feels like Boston; visitors just walk the Harborwalk.
Civic life moved too. In 2021 Boston elected Michelle Wu, the first woman and first person of color voted into the mayor’s office, and gave her a second term in 2025. In the summer of 2026, Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, billed as Boston Stadium, hosted seven FIFA World Cup matches, including a quarterfinal.
Still Boston
Sports remain the common language. The Red Sox ended an 86-year wait in 2004, and since the 2001 season the city’s four major teams have won more than a dozen championships; the Celtics’ 2024 title was their 18th, the most in NBA history. The Marathon, first run in 1897, still owns Patriots’ Day each April, the Head of the Charles crowds the riverbanks every October, and Boston Legacy FC, the city’s NWSL club, began play in 2026 at Gillette Stadium, plays its 2027 home games at Centreville Bank Stadium in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and moves into a rebuilt White Stadium in Franklin Park in 2028.
Plenty hasn’t budged. Boston Common has been public ground since 1634, the country’s first subway still runs under Tremont Street, the Swan Boats have circled the Public Garden lagoon since 1877, and Fenway Park has held its cramped block since 1912. So have the triple-deckers, the corner pubs, the iced coffee in January, and a fierce loyalty to the home neighborhood.