East Lansing, MI

East Lansing exists for one reason, and it is a good one: Michigan State University, founded in 1855 as the country's pioneer agricultural college — the working model on which the Morrill Act later patterned America's entire land-grant system. The campus along the Red Cedar River is among the most beautiful in the nation, a 19th-century arboretum of oaks and Collegiate Gothic halls where the Beaumont Tower carillon rings the hours; around it the city grew as the university's civilised front porch, its Grand River Avenue facing the campus gates.

Spartan science split atoms and bred hybrid corn, but the university also built one of the Midwest's principal stages: the Wharton Center for Performing Arts, opened in 1982, whose Cobb Great Hall — the venue in this archive's records — seats 2,400 and hosts the major orchestras, opera and Broadway tours of every season, the largest performing-arts venue in Michigan outside Detroit. The MSU College of Music fills the rest of the calendar with a conservatory's output of recitals and opera. With the state capital of Lansing directly across the city line, East Lansing enjoys a rare arrangement: the government next door, the university at home, and the concert hall in between.