New Brunswick, NJ

New Brunswick is the Hub City of New Jersey's academic and corporate life. Rutgers University, chartered here in 1766 as one of the nine colonial colleges, made the town its home; on a field near College Avenue in 1869 Rutgers beat Princeton in the first intercollegiate football game ever played, an innocent afternoon that begat an American colossus. The university's noblest son remains Paul Robeson — scholar, All-American athlete and one of the great bass voices of the twentieth century, whose renditions of spirituals carried the sorrow songs of his country to the concert halls of the world, and whose conscience cost him dearly; Rutgers honours him now at every turn.

The city's other anchor is Johnson & Johnson, headquartered downtown since 1886, whose presence funded New Brunswick's reinvention as a theatre town: the State Theatre of 1921, the restored movie palace documented in this archive, presents orchestras, opera and Broadway tours, alongside the George Street Playhouse and the Crossroads Theatre Company, the Tony Award-winning home of African-American drama. Add the Zimmerli Art Museum's vast Russian and Soviet collections and a famously polyglot restaurant scene, and this compact city on the Raritan earns its hub in every sense.