In my wildest dreams I've never thought I'd hear Boston compared to Bridgeport (I assume you mean CT?). Never been to Boston, but B'port must have changed an awful lot since I lived there :-)
The misconception is that Boston is this global city of about 4.5 million people living in academic utopia when it's a really smaller city of 600,000 people, where even a smaller percentage are actually living in ivory towers. The rest of the 4.5 million people live in typical post-industrial New England towns surrounding Boston such as Lynn, Revere and Quincy.