Now Booking | A Boston Hotel Double-Play | nytimes.com

Boston is one of those cities that can’t seem to shake its reputation: forget all the cutting-edge biotech and the newfound fashion consciousness and the burgeoning food culture — for many this will always be America’s capital of the buttoned-up, where kicking it old school trumps looking to the future. Yet in the space of less than a month two important new hotels have arrived here, the W and the Ames, and between them they’ve injected a healthy dose of the kind of modernity and style that typifies the new Boston.