Cambridge

The city of Cambridge takes a lot of hits, most of them thrown across the Charles River by jealous Bostonians. But Boston's Left Bank—an überliberal academic enclave where the city council spends more energy arguing about the regulation of nanotechnologies than on fixing potholes and funding preschools—is arguably a must-visit if you're spending even just three days in the Boston area.

The city is punctuated at one end by the funky tech-noids of MIT, and at the other by the soaring—and occasionally seething—rhetoric of the Harvard University community. Civic life connects the two camps into an urban stew of 100,000 residents who represent nearly every nationality in the world, work at every kind of job from tenured professor to taxi driver, and are passionate about living on this side of the river.

The Charles River is Cantabrigians' backyard, running track, and festival ground, and there's virtually no place in Cambridge more than a 10-minute walk from its banks. No visit to Cambridge would be complete without an afternoon (at least) in Harvard Square. It's a hub, a hot spot, and home to every variation of the human condition. A walk down Brattle Street past Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's house is a joy in spring, summer, and fall (you have to be hard core to love Harvard Square in the dead of winter). Farther along Massachusetts Avenue is Central Square, an ethnic melting pot of people and restaurants. Ten minutes more brings you to MIT, with its eclectic architecture, from postwar pedestrian to Frank Gehry's futuristic fantasyland.

In addition to providing a stellar view, the Mass Ave. Bridge, spanning the Charles from Cambridge to Boston, is also notorious in MIT lore for its Smoot measurements see "Campus Pranksters" under Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Cambridge dates from 1630, when the Puritan leader John Winthrop chose this meadowland as the site of a carefully planned village he named Newtowne. The Massachusetts Bay Colony chose Newtowne as the site for the country's first college in 1636. Two years later, John Harvard bequeathed half his estate and his private library to the fledgling school, and the college was named in his honor. The town elders changed the name to Cambridge, emulating the university in England where most of the Puritan leaders had been educated.

When Cambridge was incorporated as a city in 1846, the boundaries were drawn to include the university area (today's Harvard Square and Tory Row), and the more-industrial communities of Cambridgeport and East Cambridge. By 1900 the population of these urban industrial and working-class communities, made up of Irish, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, and French Canadian residents, dwarfed the Harvard end of town. Today's city is much more a multiethnic urban community than an academic village. Visitors in search of any kind of ethnic food or music will find it in Cambridge—the local high school educates students who speak more than 40 different languages at home. When MIT, originally Boston Tech, moved to Cambridge in 1916, it was the first educational institution that aimed to be more than a trade school, training engineers but also grounding them in humanities and liberal arts. Many of MIT's postwar graduates remained in the area, and went on to form hundreds of technology-based firms engaged in camera manufacturing, electronics, and space research. By the 1990s, manufacturing had moved to the burbs and software developers, venture capitalists, and robotics and biotech companies claimed the former industrial spaces. This area around Kendall Square is now nicknamed "Intelligence Alley."