Boston, famous for having declared itself the Hub of the Solar System, the Athens of America and, more recently, the Capital of the North Atlantic Rim, has been feeling a little glum this week about the loss of its last big locally-headquartered bank.

John Hancock, the last major company of its once-great insurance industry, sold out in September to Canadians. New Yorkers took over the city's biggest newspaper, The Boston Globe, a decade ago.

And now an agglomeration of New England banks that includes a once-distinctive lender with roots going back to 1784 last week agreed to be acquired by a much bigger banking company based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Even the sainted old Atlantic Monthly may be on the brink of being moved by its owner to Washington, D.C.

So for those of us who live here, and those who merely wish to visit, it's worth thinking back briefly to the days when Boston was the global capital of refrigeration.

It was in 1806 that 21-year-old Frederic Tudor shipped his first cargo of ice to the Caribbean. The idea had been that of a brother -- a joke, really, made at a party. Tudor bought a notebook, which he labeled "Ice-house Diary."

On the cover he printed an inscription: "He who gives back at the first repulse and without striking the second blow despairs of success[,] has never been, is not, and never will be a hero in war, love or business"

(Tudor's story is well told in the third volume of historian Daniel Boorstin's great trilogy, The Americans, from which all the details here are drawn. The Massachusetts Historical Society has published a paperback biography as well.)

Within a year Tudor had spent $10,000 shipping 130 tons of ice to the island of Martinique. He lost $4,000. It took fifteen more years to become reliably profitable -- to win monopolies on ice houses in southern cities such as Charleston and Havana; to obtain secure rights to harvest ice from New England ponds (chiefly Fresh Pond in Cambridge, but Concord's Walden Pond as well); to cultivate an extensive demand for iced drinks, ice cream, ice boxes for refrigeration.

Tudor invested heavily in research and development -- better insulation, faster ships. But the real breakthrough came when he invented a machine that cut pond ice into two-foot cubes that could be stowed, tightly packed, as ballast on south-sailing ships, replacing stone.

He also honed his taste for strategic behavior. "Wherever he managed to build an efficient storage depot," Boorstin writes, "he had a great advantage against competitors: he would sell his ice at a penny a pound till his competitor's stock had all melted at the dock and then he would raise his price to recoup his profit."

By 1833, Tudor was shipping ice halfway around the world -- 180 tons to Calcutta. By 1846, Boston shipped 65,000 tons of ice, and ten years later, more than twice as much, to ports as far away as Australia and China. "Ice had become a major commodity, a New England staple for the world market," writes Boorstin. Tudor had become known far and wide as "The Ice King."

Then, gradually, the bottom began to drop out of Boston's ice business. Other firms entered the business, bringing down prices. Tinkerers invented means of mechanical refrigeration -- gas compression as early as 1851, vapor compression using ammonia by 1859. Natural ice suffered increasingly from problems of pollution.

And by the 1920s, when Frigidaire Co. replaced ammonia with the synthetic coolant it patented as Freon, even modest homeowners could manufacture ice cubes of their own. "Ice boxes" -- refrigerators cooled by blocks of natural ice -- were quaint relics of the past.

But Boston didn't disappear just because its ice business melted away. Tudor himself was a poster boy for the replacement process. Again, Boorstin:

"In his early years, he had traded in pimento, nutmeg, flour, sugar, tea, candles, cotton, silk, and claret. Later he dug for coal on Martha's Vineyard; he invented a siphon for pumping water from the holds of vessels; he made a new design for the hull of a ship (The Black Swan) and for a 'double-dory,' supposedly an improvement over earlier fishing vessels; he operated a graphite mine; he made paper from white pine; and he experimented with the raising of cotton and tobacco at Nahant.

"He brought to New England the first steam locomotive; an engine of one-half horsepower, which ran on the sidewalk at four miles per hour pulling a car for one passenger. He set up what was probably the first amusement park in America. And he even tried raising salt-water fish in Fresh Pond."

Tudor himself didn't flourish particularly. He often borrowed heavily to finance his plunges. His family fought like cats and dogs over the money he had made. But all the enterprises in which he was involved paid off in some degree for other Bostonians. The fast ships he bankrolled were the precursors of the famous Boston clipper ships. The ice trade with Asia reinvigorated Yankee traders, who in the 1830s had been sidelined by high protective tariffs, just in time for the opium boom. And opium profits, in turn, were reinvested first to finance portions of the railroad expansion and then the telephone boom.

That's been the Boston story ever since. Textile mills and shoe machinery and the fruit business are gone. Alexander Graham Bell came to Boston seeking help and backing, but the headquarters of the Bell System soon moved to New York. General Electric started here, at least part of it, but long ago moved west.

Raytheon and RCA invented radio and radar here. The first jet engines were manufactured in Lynn, just north of the city. Digital Equipment Corp. introduced real-time computing, and Bolt Beranek & Newman invented the networking system known as the ARPANET. So minicomputers have given way to servers and routers, and the Internet to the World Wide Web.

The banks may be gone, but the vigorous venture capital industry that grew out of them remains. So does the highly successful money management business. Boston's once insuperable lead over other centers in medicine has diminished; but its leadership in biotechnology is probably greater than ever.

The thing about successful cities, as Jane Jacobs pointed out long ago, is that they generate their own renewal. New work grows out of old. And Boston does better than most because, since its very beginnings, it has been a center of education, a potent source of both new ideas and high-skilled talent.

Thus new businesses continue to throng to the city. Land rents and real estate prices remain among the highest in the country. Boston long has understood that when businesses mature, they move to the suburbs. So it's become a branch city in retail banking? It's branch city in refrigeration, too.