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Philly seems the larger city in both 1790 and 1800, but Boston sure does have a lot of colonial buildings and is older than Philly so not sure which has more now. How well preserved is the colonial architecture in each city?
Also,
per square mile, does the inner city of Philly or Boston seem to have more colonial era historic architecture, and historic architecture in general for that matter? I've only been to Boston so I can't say.
One thing I can say is that Boston's areas like Beacon Hill and North End look glorious for their age. Pristine and enviable condition. I rarely feel that I could want to live somewhere else but I left Boston a week ago sort of wanting to live there, to try it out. The homes especially on Beacon Hill were grand and marvelous for a lack of better words. So that's saying something.
Most of North End isn't colonial era — it's mid 19th century tenemnets. You can see a few older colonial era housing squeezed in; they look rather different. Charlestown across the river has some from the first few decades of the 1800s but not too much pre-1812. A number of Boston suburbs have a lot of pre-1812 housing; particularly the North Shore (Salem, Marblehead and Gloucester). Could dig up pictures. The Massachusetts State Capitol building itself (in Beacon Hill) was built in the 1790s.
I still think Philadelphia has more colonial architecture.
A local might be able to find better ones. Different styles to their old districts. Philadelphia's oldest districts seem to have less consistency: historic looking block, then something more modern looking mixed in. Big black mark against Boston for purposefully destroying one its historic district (West End) with some colonial-era buildings.
I know NYC isn't on the thread but there's also the CVS in Brooklyn:
A local might be able to find better ones. Different styles to their old districts. Philadelphia's oldest districts seem to have less consistency: historic looking block, then something more modern looking mixed in. Big black mark against Boston for purposefully destroying one its historic district (West End) with some colonial-era buildings.
I know NYC isn't on the thread but there's also the CVS in Brooklyn:
I feel that between Society Hill and the Old City part of Center City, there's actually more 18th Century architecture present in Philadelphia than Boston. And this is just from visting both cities as a tourist and a someone who reads a lot about history. But in the eastern portion of Center City there's a lot of colonial architecture and historic buildings--I'd say the most in the country in one area which a walk around the neighborhood will reveal. Boston does has a lot of historic sites like the Old State House, Old North Church, and so on scattered around downtown, but much of the architecture in between them is from later in the 19th Century. Reading about the Paul Revere House(which is from 1680 and the oldest example of colonial residential architecture in the North End), it's interesting that Boston tore down a lot it's colonial architecture in the downtown area during the growth of the 19th Century(and later) as did a lot of cities that boomed in that period. Thought the North End is still a very interesting neighborhood.
A lot of the oldest architecture in both cities is actually post-Colonial--it's the Georgian and Federal-styles that were common after the Revolution in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Beacon Hill and Society Hill have a lot of Federal-style townhouses--probably the two best and most prominent examples of that style in the nation.
There's a lot of old colonial residential architecture on the outskirts of both cities though. There's a lot of surviving colonial buildings in small towns close to Boston. Places like Salem and Concord seem to have a lot of buildings going back to the 17th Century.
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