Most places in Boston evolve semi-imperceptibly; as new buildings are added they retain their character. This place has, however, changed totally since it was a gritty film noir city street with elevated structures, rumbling trains and neon-lit bars.
It was better then.
Here's someone that can't disagree with you more. Bill Simmons from ESPN, used to live here in Boston and moved out to L.A. because he was a writer for the Jimmy Kimmel show. Known as the "Boston Sports Guy" before and now just "The Sports Guy" writes for ESPN.com, probably their most read writer.
"Digging a little deeper, the revival of the Celtics, Red Sox and Patriots mirrors something that's happening to Boston as a whole. Quite simply, the city that I left behind in 2002 doesn't exist anymore.
Once upon a time, Boston was a pretty easy place to understand. Things never changed and, more importantly, we liked it that things never changed. Life revolved around the weather cycles (often brutal), the sports teams (often disappointing) and those occasionally fabulous days in April or October when the sun was shining and there wasn't a prettier place to be. We dealt with traffic, snow, construction, parking problems and sports letdowns year after year, and that's just who we were. Everything was symbolized by the Big Dig, a project that promised to rejuvenate the city and put our highways underground, only it fell years behind schedule and bled billions in cost overruns, rendering Boston impotent for a number of years. I graduated from college in '92 and spent the next decade living in the city (mostly in Charlestown) dealing with jackhammers and detours the entire time. After a while, you stopped thinking about it and assumed that's the way the city would always be -- mangled, ugly and messed up. Nobody could conceive of life after the Big Dig. It just seemed incomprehensible.
Well, the project finally ended two years ago. Remember the reality show "The Swan," in which someone gets an extreme makeover and tons of plastic surgery and family members stare at him or her in complete disbelief? That's how I feel every time I come back to Boston. If there was a defining trait for the Causeway area other than the old Garden, it was the Green Line, which ran above ground (you might recall seeing the shot of the train rumbling toward the Garden before every Celtics game) and right over Causeway Street. Scattered around the area were a number of bars, including some classic ones (Harp, Sullivan's Tap, Four's) and a never-ending group of bars in static locations that always seemed to change names every 18 months. On paper, this seems kind of cool. In reality, it meant the tracks hung over the street, blocked every inch of sunlight and dripped smelly water every time it rained or snowed, and on top of that, you had to hear the deafening screech of the train rumbling by every few minutes.
Here's why I'm telling you this: The Causeway of 2008 has zero in common with the Causeway of 1998. Once the construction was finished, you could have blindfolded me, spun me around a few times, dropped me in the middle of Causeway and asked me where I was, and I wouldn't have had a clue until I noticed the Harp or Halftime Pizza, and even then, I would have been confused. You wouldn't call the area beautiful or anything, but it's sunny and happy, and in an implausible twist, you can stand at the old North Station stop -- flanked by a ghastly and unsafe I-93 ramp once upon a time -- turn toward Faneuil Hall and actually see Faneuil Hall from a distance. What was once highway ramps, bridges, "T" tracks and construction has been replaced by grass and sidewalks. "Incredible" isn't a strong enough word. In fact, you could walk from Quincy Market to the North End to Causeway Street to the Red Hat to the top of Charles Street and (A) remain in the sun for the entire time and (B) actually enjoy the trip without feeling you might get mugged.
It's just a different city. The Baby Boomer generation keeps drifting from the suburbs into Back Bay, the South End, the North End or Beacon Hill, leading to a peculiar situation in which real estate prices keep climbing in a market in which prices are swooning everywhere else. And thanks to relaxed tax laws, Hollywood has descended on downtown in droves; instead of nonstop construction, you're more prone to see trailers, lights and policemen blocking off a brownstone or a building. On Friday night, I went to pick up my friend Willy at his place on Commonwealth Avenue; across the street, something was happening but I couldn't figure out what.
"That's where they're filming the new Bruce Willis movie," Willy said matter-of-factly.
Oh.
Living here from day to day, it's probably tougher to realize how much Boston has changed -- how many nice restaurants, clubs and bars are scattered throughout the city, how much easier it is to get around, how much happier and efficient and sleeker things seem -- but it's something I couldn't stop wrapping my head around for six days, from the moment I arrived at Logan Airport (no longer a travesty of a dump, by the way) and found myself in one of those secret handshake tunnels that cab drivers use now to get from Logan into the city. Crazy. The whole thing is crazy.
The dramatic shift in fortunes is symbolized by one piece of turf in Beacon Hill, right next to the Storrow Drive West ramp, about a block from the top of Charles Street, formerly the home of Buzzy's Roast Beef. For the uninitiated, Buzzy's was the 24-hour place you went after a night of drinking for some unhealthy food; if you were lucky, you might run into a couple of girls there and strike up a conversation, only there was nowhere to go because the bars closed at 2 a.m., and besides, both parties were covered in cheese and barbecue sauce, so nothing would have happened, anyway. It was located right next to the Charles Street jail and Mass General Hospital, in a stretch of Beacon Hill that always seemed to have stabbings and muggings. As the old adage went, it was OK to stumble out of the Beacon Hill Pub and walk straight to Buzzy's, as long as you never took a right.
Where's Buzzy's now? It's in Roast Beef Heaven. The jail has been turned into a boutique hotel called The Liberty that happens to have the hottest bar in town, a place called Alibi that's unlike any Boston scene I can remember. There's a doorman, valets, celebrities, $12 drinks and dressed-up women hoping to hook up with rich guys, as well as an extensive line just to get into the hotel to drink upstairs in the Bar That Nobody Really Wants To Be At Because They'd Rather Be At Alibi. Back in the mid-1990s, the hottest place on Wednesday nights was the Warren Tavern in Charlestown -- a relatively dark pub that didn't have one cool thing about it other than that it was built in the 1780s and Paul Revere allegedly drank there. People waited in line for 25-30 minutes just to get inside a hot room to order some draft beer in the same place that Paul Revere allegedly ordered a draft beer. And not to sound like a grumpy old man, but we LOVED IT! Back in 1995, had you shown me a clip of the Liberty Hotel's bar scene 13 years later, I would have kept shaking my head and saying, "No, no, no way ? it's impossible ? not in Boston ? no way ?"
I found this to be a great piece INSIDE a sports column about the NBA Finals. The whole thing can be read here:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/080609&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab2pos1 but I just included this part because it was really interesting to see how he views the changes as someone who lived here and left and came back.
. I do not reside in the suburbs because of my aesthetic preference for the protoype colonial home with a yard over an urban environment. I did not like these changes when they occured which happened while I was a Boston resident. I would not have sold my home in Boston of nearly 8 years but for the sole fact that I had two children and another on the way. I weighed the potential cost of 12 years of private education for 3 children to stay in Boston vs. sending the kids to a public school a few blocks from a suburban home. Tuition $ is gone forever, whereas the same money put toward real estate hopefully will appreciate or at least maintain its value in the long run. If I had small family, e.g., one child, or no kids I would still be in my old place. From my point of view, the suburban lifestyle came with sacrifices, much more taxing commute, somewhat higher taxes (although nothing compared to private school tuition) and less access to valued amenities. From the point of view of children, in my opinion, the suburbs do have some advantages. Overall I do miss living in Boston, but in my particular circumstance, the tradeoff for the schools made the move to burbs worth it for us. Others may have made a different decisions than me. It wasn't an easy decision. I prefer city living and foresee my wife and I returning to Boston when the kids no longer in the home. 
