WORCESTER, Mass. — Although College of the Holy Cross was founded here in 1843, and eight other prominent institutions of higher learning followed, it has taken most of the last two centuries for this sizable New England city to consider itself a college town.

It does now. From one end of the city’s 245-acre central core to the other, Worcester is attending to the 35,000 college students who study and live here, and its primary boulevards are steadily filling up with the civic amenities that attract new residents. They include a busy public transit hub, comfortable and affordable housing, new restaurants and watering holes, computer stores and coffee shops, a performing arts theater, biotech research facilities, incubators and office space for start-up companies, and renovated parks — including one alongside City Hall with an ice rink larger than the one in Rockefeller Center.

The newest project in Worcester’s revitalization portfolio is CitySquare, a $565 million, 12-acre mixed-use development just east of City Hall. It replaces a two-story, one-million-square-foot downtown shopping mall that took up almost 10 percent of Worcester’s central business district.

The former Worcester Center Galleria, built at a cost of $127 million, thrived for a decade after it opened in 1971, but by the turn of the century it had gone dark. In the two years since it was demolished, Worcester spent $59 million burying utilities, preparing building sites for new construction, and reconstructing and connecting four streets in the district to the city’s street grid.