New Yorker calls Brighton rundown

He must have been referring to the Bishop's residence.

I say good. Keep those dirty New Yawkers out of my section of town. The more they think it sucks in Brighton, the more I know it's great.

Take a nice tour of the northwest, starting with Portland, moving on to Seattle, and then culminating in a swing through Vancouver, BC, and Edmonton and Calgary, AB.

Fly to NYC, and then take a train to Boston.

I think this will neatly explain why anybody from NYC calling any part of Boston "run down" is a total farce - NYC and Boston are both very much "run down" when compared to boomtowns of the West that have been gaining enormous amounts of population in the last 20 years - and, unlike Atlanta, have carefully planned and directed where they put those people.

That doesn't make Boston and NYC bad or scary per se - it just makes them somewhat indistinguishable from each other when it comes to having older housing stock in various states of upkeep, older buildings on major routes, etc.Brighton looks like much of the Boston Area and fair amount of the NYC area that wasn't built up with high rises. Spend any time in the well-planned boomtowns and it all looks old.