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We’ve testified on multiple occations that making friends in Boston is a difficult chore. So rude and raw are Bostonians, in fact, that it was recently ranked as no. 5 for Travel + Leisure‘s latest ranking of unfriendly cities.
“Beantown denizens put off readers with their Brahmin-like brains and their skillful backtalk,” wrote Travel + Leisure. “They ranked at No. 5 in the survey for both intelligence and rudeness.”
Hard to argue with that. And if you simply walk down the street, you’re sure to encounter plenty of aggravated drivers, blaring horns and spiteful pedestrians rushing up and down the street.
But that’s not to say every Bostonian is abrasive and aggressive. There are plenty of welcoming and accommodating folk here.
“Of course, finding a city’s friendly locals may just be a matter of knowing where—and when—to look,” wrote Travel + Leisure‘s Katrina Brown Hunt.
New York City, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C. rounded out the top five. Interestingly, most of the cities on the list of 15 nationwide metropolises are coastal, save for Las Vegas and Dallas and Orlando. The list is also occupied by some of the most populated cities in the country – New York, Los Angeles, Chicago are the top three most populated cities. Dallas is in the top 10.
Joining Boston as a New England representative is Providence, which “struck readers as being bookishly aloof—No. 10 for rudeness, and No. 1 for being geek.”
Conversely, on the list of friendliest cities – topped by Nashville, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Kansas City and Oklahoma City – are urban centers for the most part landlocked.
It wasn’t all Boston bashing in Travel + Leisure’s series of American cities surveys. It took the no. 7 slot in the list of most cultured as well.
Boston’s cultural personality is deeply entwined with its sense of history, which readers ranked at No. 4. After all, the Museum of Fine Arts first opened on our nation’s centennial (and these days is getting ready for spring and summer concerts on the courtyard), while the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was once the home of the 19th-century art collector who, like many Bostonians today, was a big fan of both the Boston Symphony and the Red Sox.
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