Fairfax, VA

Fairfax, Virginia appears twice in the source register — once with its concert hall and once bare, under "Fairfax" and "Fairfax VA" — and the two headings are merged here into the single city they describe (an editorial correction for the registry). The small independent city, wrapped inside the county of the same name in the Washington suburbs, grew from a courthouse crossroads: the Fairfax County Courthouse of 1800 still stands at the old junction, and around it the region transformed from Virginia farmland into one of the most educated and prosperous metropolitan corridors in America.

The name above the door of its modern life is George Mason — the Virginia founding father whose Declaration of Rights of 1776 supplied the model for the Bill of Rights, and whose namesake university on the city's edge has become the largest in Virginia. George Mason University also built the hall that brings Fairfax into this archive: the Center for the Arts, a 2,000-seat concert hall whose season of visiting orchestras, opera, ballet and international ensembles has made the campus the performing-arts anchor of Northern Virginia since 1990. History at the courthouse, the Constitution's conscience on the diploma, and a serious concert hall in the suburbs: Fairfax compresses the American capital region into city-state size.