It's been 35 years since I lived in the Boston area, so this may have changed some -- I certainly hope it has! -- but the ethnic animosities there shocked me, as someone who moved there from the DC area and had the idea that Northern cities would be more tolerant. I moved into an apartment in East Cambridge in 1982, in what was, unbeknownst to me before I got there, a Polish neighborhood, only to learn that a few weeks earlier, a Black residence on the same street had been firebombed.