An internationally acclaimed museum on its waterfront. Celebrity chefs with restaurants in different neighborhoods. People starting work downtown at 8 a.m., going to dinner at 8 or 9 p.m. and staying in town until 11 p.m. or midnight to catch a movie.

This 18-hour city is the “new Boston,” a place where luxury apartments, high-end office space and entertainment venues have become the norm.

This is not your father’s Boston, where people came downtown to work and buzzed right back out to the suburbs, avoiding areas like the Combat Zone, South Boston and most of downtown like the plague. And unless the Red Sox were playing or you attended Boston University, there was nothing to do in the Fenway neighborhood but wander around desolate streets and abandoned warehouses.

But many know the new story. Ritzy towers, college dorms and shiny new theaters for screen and stage have replaced most of the former crime-ridden corners of the Combat Zone, while Centerfolds and the Glass Slipper reside quietly as the neighborhood’s “Gentlemen’s Clubs.”

In the Fenway, new restaurants abound, City Hall has created an entertainment district for Lansdowne Street and formerly floundering Fenway Park has been remade by new ownership.

And in South Boston, the waterfront and Fort Point areas are the new hot spot for developers and real estate investors, the Institute for Contemporary Art is here to stay and yuppies galore rent apartments in the townie-filled, predominantly Irish-American neighborhood.

New Developments Bolster Activity

“If you look at a lot of those areas, like the South End and the Fenway, it took rezoning of districts to allow a lot of this type of 18-hour activity to happen,” said Randi Lathrop, deputy director of community planning for the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA). “Allowing businesses to stay open into the later hours affects all that development activity a lot.”

And new development has been a critical part of creating the new Boston, said Boston City Councilor Michael Ross, whose district includes Fenway, Back Bay and Beacon Hill. Ross has been in the trenches during skirmishes where developers, residents and neighborhood groups clash on decisions of building height, hours of business operations and what types of uses are appropriate for neighborhoods, many times on a street-by-street basis.

“The bars that used to be here are now quality restaurants,” Ross told Banker & Tradesman. “Celebrity chefs are something Boston never had five or 10 years ago. That’s changed the way people go out and participate in the public realm. And there are more opportunities to meet and network, from Shakespeare on the Common to food trucks. There’s a continuing burgeoning artists’ market and museum culture in the city. We’ve changed the traditional norms people think of when they think of Boston. The type of mixed-use development in the city recently has absolutely appealed to young professionals and helped grow the city.”

Tweaking “traditional norms” to allow for a mix of retail, residential and offices in a neighborhood helps the city in the long-term, according to Adam Weiner of Weiner Ventures. His development and private investment firm partnered with Samuels & Assoc. to create mixed-use projects like Fenway Triangle Trilogy, a 586-unit apartment tower with mixed retail on the ground floor at the corner of Brookline Avenue and Boylston Street. Another Samuels Fenway development is 1330 Boylston, a 200-unit luxury apartment and retail mixed-use project with restaurants on the ground floor.

“Samuels and the neighborhood groups and the BRA have really recognized what a special neighborhood the Fenway is,” Weiner said. “There’s more retail and restaurants and residential places, a greater vibe of excitement and activity. It never really had its own exciting identity, and it is now like an urban village where your needs can mostly all be met in the neighborhood. That makes for an 18-hour neighborhood.”

Revolution Of ’76

But Boston hasn’t always had the kinds of amenities that attract tourists and residents to visit or live downtown. The watershed for that occurred in 1976 with the creation of the Faneuil Hall marketplace, 200 years after another watershed for Boston and the independence of a nation, said developer Ronald Druker, head of the Druker Co. After that in the 1980s came the advent of downtown condominiums. Those two events combined to attract people from outside Boston to eat and shop and live within the city limits, Druker opined. And like Weiner, Druker cites the mix of uses in recent projects that perpetuates the relationship between various uses – working, living, playing – that help an area buzz with activity for 18 hours a day.

In addition, without the end of rent control in the early 1990s, the kinds of upscale entertainment so popular in the city would have had a hard time getting built, said developer John Rosenthal, president of Meredith Management. Once rent control was abolished developers could build market-rate residential buildings with a high level of services and high rents to support the kinds of restaurants and nightlife that have become the norm in Boston, Rosenthal offered.