Funny you should mention Boston. Paul Graham used to say there were three places to start a company - Cambridge / MIT / Harvard, Berkeley / UC Berkeley, and Palo Alto / Stanford. And he commuted between Boston and Silicon Valley.

Then he decided Boston was not a good place to raise a child and moved full-time to Silicon Valley. It's written up somewhere on his blog - I don't have the link handy. I don't know much about Boston these days, but in the early 1980s when I used to call on DSP folk with Floating Point Systems, it seemed vibrant. And the food was a lot better than anything I've ever had in Silicon Valley. ;-)