Gainesville, FL

Gainesville, Florida — fixed by its venue, the University of Florida's Phillips Center — is a college town sitting on the strangest countryside in the state. Paynes Prairie, just south of the city, is a vast savanna basin where wild-roaming bison and horses graze and alligators sun by the hundreds; the naturalist William Bartram described it rapturously in 1774, and it became Florida's first state preserve. The town above it belongs to the Gators: the University of Florida, one of the largest universities in the country, whose stadium roars on autumn Saturdays and whose laboratories gave the world Gatorade — invented in 1965 for the football team and named for it.

The university also supplies the city's concert life. The Curtis M. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts — recorded in this archive as the Phillips Performing Arts Center — is North Central Florida's principal hall, presenting touring orchestras, opera, ballet and Broadway seasons alongside the university's own ensembles. Gainesville's counterculture wrote its own history: Tom Petty was born and raised here, learning his trade in its clubs before conquering American rock, and the city still honours him with a park and an annual festival. Bison on the prairie, Petty on the radio, orchestras at the Phillips: Gainesville is Florida's unexpected inland heart.