Just to the north, though, Route 1 remains the Masshole answer to Old Las Vegas-both amusingly ostentatious (there’s a pizza place with its own scaled-for-suburbia replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa) and coated with a thin layer of suburban-desert dust and grime. The city is cleaner and safer, for sure, but it’s also lost a bit of the peculiar grit and whimsy that is, in my opinion, an important part of what makes urban living worth the rent. Once a working-class crazy quilt of a city, the Hub over the years has ironed out most of its weirder wrinkles and bleached its dirtier seams to become a more palatable place for white-collar types to live, work, and play.
It’s part of one of America’s first interstate highways, and with its gaudy themed restaurants, fleabag lodgings, topless bars, and assortment of other vaguely dated diversions, it still feels like a place out of time-especially when compared to Boston, just down the street. For years, whenever I’ve braved the endless stream of speeding souped-up cars on my way to-and-fro the North Shore along Route 1, I’ve found myself fascinated by the piercing stretch of road.
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