Cambridge: Harvard, MIT, and America's Greatest University City

Cambridge sits across the Charles River from Boston, technically a separate city with its own government and identity, but connected to Boston by bridges, subway lines, and the continuous urban fabric of the Greater Boston metropolitan area in a way that makes the distinction largely administrative. The city's identity is defined by two institutions whose combined intellectual output and economic weight shapes not just Cambridge but the trajectory of American science, technology, and humane culture: Harvard University (founded 1636, the oldest institution of higher education in the Western hemisphere) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (founded 1861, relocated to Cambridge in 1916), whose campuses occupy Cambridge's eastern and western sections respectively and between them employ and educate a combined community of over 50,000 people.

Harvard's campus — the Yard, with its historic red-brick dormitories, the John Harvard statue (touching the statue's left shoe is said to confer good luck, which is why it shines), and the Memorial Church and Widener Library facing each other across the main court — is one of the most visited university campuses in America and functions as a public park as well as an educational institution. The Harvard Art Museums, consolidated in a Renzo Piano building in 2014, house one of the finest university art collections in the world: the Fogg Museum's European paintings, the Busch-Reisinger's German Expressionist collection, and the Arthur M. Sackler's Asian and ancient art. MIT's campus along the Charles River provides a different architectural experience: the contrast between the neoclassical Killian Court main buildings and the more recent structures by Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, and Frank Gehry documents the history of American modernist architecture in a compressed and walkable form.

The commercial life of Cambridge concentrates in Harvard Square — a concentration of bookshops (the Harvard Book Store, with its remarkable used books basement, is among the best independent bookshops in America), cafés, and restaurants that serve the university community with sufficient quality and variety to make the square a destination for Boston residents as well as Harvard affiliates. The MIT area along Massachusetts Avenue holds the cafés and restaurants that serve a more technically-oriented population, with a food truck culture around the MIT campus and the Portuguese bakeries and Vietnamese restaurants of the Inman Square neighbourhood nearby providing the multicultural food infrastructure that university cities require. Cambridge's density of Nobel laureates, MacArthur Fellows, and Fields medalists per square kilometre is without global equivalent, a fact that the city's restaurants, coffee shops, and public spaces reflect in the specific quality of overheard conversation.