Living in Cambridge, Boston

Cambridge, its own city across the Charles River from Boston, holds two of the world's best-known universities within a couple of miles of each other. Harvard Yard's brick quadrangle anchors Harvard Square, where the Harvard Art Museums, the Coop bookstore, and the Brattle Theatre's single screen sit within a few blocks of Massachusetts Avenue's shops and cafes. MIT's campus stretches for more than a mile along the Charles River Basin to the east, its Great Dome and the Stata Center's tilted planes marking two very different eras of the institute's architecture. Central Square, about a mile down Massachusetts Avenue, holds a denser, less polished commercial strip of restaurants and longtime local businesses than Harvard Square's storefronts. John F. Kennedy Memorial Park, built on the riverside site once chosen for the Kennedy Presidential Library before local opposition sent that project to Dorchester instead, sits a block from Harvard Square with a granite fountain engraved in Kennedy's own words. The Red Line runs the length of Cambridge, with Harvard, Central, and Kendall/MIT stations giving each square its own stop.

Cambridge runs its own permitting and rental rules separate from Boston's across the river, so a lease, a parking permit, or a renovation here follows an entirely different city's process.

A walk through Harvard Yard, a browse through Central Square's record shops, and an evening along the Charles near MIT's boathouses show why Cambridge holds its own gravity rather than functioning as an extension of Boston.