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Everything old is new again since über-chef Lydia Shire took over Boston’s oldest gourmet restaurant (c.1875) and breathed new life into the classic haute cuisine dishes. Her crisped duck with elderberries and ginger achieves the perfect crackling over succulent meat. The city’s most established families dine here.

Harvard’s Loeb Drama Center trains the university’s performing arts students and houses one of New England’s best theater companies, the American Repertory Theatre. The ART constantly balances the familiar with the new, presenting unorthodox stagings of Shakespeare, work by up-and-coming playwrights, and spirited plays for children.

The modern Marriott Hotel masks Long Wharf’s near 300 years of indispensability to Boston’s merchant industry. Given its deep frontage and proximity to waterfront warehouses, the biggest ships of their day could dock here. Today, ferry services and enormous cruise vessels depart from the wharf, creating a spirited dock scene.

The entire Charles River Basin becomes your oyster on the “T” between Kendall and Charles/MGH stops.

Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow can be credited with helping to shape Boston’s – and America’s – collective identity. His poetic documentation of Paul Revere’s midnight ride (see Paul Revere (1735–1818)) immortalized both him and his subject. In 1837, Longfellow took up residence in this house in the country’s academic heart, a few blocks from Harvard Yard. He was not the house’s first illustrious resident. General George Washington headquartered and planned the 1776 siege of Boston in these rooms. The building is preserved with furnishings of Longfellow’s and Washington’s heydays, and houses the poet’s personal archives.

Louis offers the city’s most rarified shopping experience. The main attractions here are classically handsome Brioni suits, sharp Jil Sander leather pumps, and Apothecary cosmetics.

Little Women sealed Alcott’s (1832–88) literary fame, but she also acted as a nurse in the Civil War.

Known for its extensive dunes, Lovell’s also has a supervised swimming beach. Extensive hiking trails lead across dunes and through woodlands. The remains of Fort Standish, active during the Spanish American War and World War I, can also be explored.

Lowell was the cradle of the US’s Industrial Revolution, where entrepreneurs dug power canals and built America’s first textile mills on the Merrimack River. The sites within the National Historical Park (246 Market St) tell the parallel stories of a wrenching transformation from agricultural to industrial lifestyle, and the rise of the American labor movement. A 1920s weave room still thunders away at Boott Cotton Mills Museum (400 John St).