Athens of America

The church’s location — in the “Athens of America” and mere blocks from the White House — made it an important center for African American cultural and political thought at a time when the issue of what citizenship meant for Black Americans was still unsettled, said William H. Lamar IV, the current pastor at Metropolitan A.M.E.

Although New York was growing as an industrial powerhouse and quickly outstripping Boston — the one-time “Athens of America” — it was also, as Weiss puts it, “a pretty grim city.”

Here in Boston, Tuesday’s result has registered as something deeper, not only an earthquake disrupting the established political order but a jolt to the very identity of a historic American city, one that likes to call itself “the Athens of America” but is perpetually reckoning with its own reputation for provincialism, particularly on matters of race.

Once nicknamed the “German Athens of America”, by the 1930s Milwaukee hosted the largest German-born population in the country outside of Chicago and New York City.

While other industries shrivel, the Boston super cluster grows, with the life-sciences professionals of the world lighting out for the Athens of America and the massive new “innovation centers” shoehorning themselves one after the other into the crowded academic suburb of Cambridge.