The old John Hancock Tower and Boston skyline as it appeared in 1956, before the proliferation of skyscrapers in “The Hub’’.
“Boston is not a small New York … but is, rather, a specially organized small creature with its small-creature’s temperature, balance, and distribution of fat. In Boston there is an utter absence of that wild, electric beauty of New York, of the marvelous, excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, of the great avenues and streets, the restaurants, theaters, bars, hotels, delicatessans, shops. In Boston the night comes down an incredibly heavy, small-town finality. . . . There is a curious flimsiness and indifference in the commercial life of Boston. The restaurants are, charitably to be called mediocre; the famous sea food is only palatable when raw. . . . Downtown Boston at night is a dreary jungle of honky-tonks for sailors, dreary department-store windows, Loew’s movie houses, hillbilly bands, strippers, parking lots, undistinguished new buildings. . . . The merchandise in the Newbury Street shops is designed in a high fashion, elaborate, furred and sequined, but it is never seen anywhere. Perhaps it is for out-of-town use, like a traveling man’s mistress.’’
— Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007; critic, short story writer and novelist), in the December 1959 Harper’s Magazine
