Boston is extremely walkable, it's a relatively small big city and most of it was built before cars. I've got a picture of my old apartment building with dirt streets and a horse carriage out front. I used to regularly walk from one end of the city to the other for leisure. The T is surprisingly good public transit for america too. They've even been doing free fares on some of the bus routes for the last few years, and just extended that experiment because it was pretty successful.

People drag it for not being a grid sometimes (the "paved-over cowpaths" myth) but that's because the streets go around hills since they needed to be traversed by people and horses.