New Haven, CT

New Haven laid out America's first planned city — nine perfect squares in 1638, the central one preserved as the elm-shaded Green — and then spent four centuries filling the grid with distinction. Yale University, in town since 1716, built around it a Gothic dream of courtyards and towers housing treasures from the Gutenberg Bible in Beinecke's translucent marble box to two of the country's finest university art galleries; Yale's School of Music and the symphonic organ of Woolsey Hall make the campus a concert city in itself, and the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1894, is among the oldest in the United States.

The archive's stage is the Shubert Theatre of 1914, which earned its billing as the "Birthplace of the Nation's Greatest Hits": in the tryout decades, Broadway shows were tuned here before New York saw them — Oklahoma! opened at the Shubert under its working title, and A Streetcar Named Desire, My Fair Lady and dozens more had their first nights on College Street. The city's populist claims are edible: Louis' Lunch asserts the invention of the hamburger, and New Haven "apizza" — Pepe's white clam pie above all — commands national pilgrimage. Nine squares, one Green, and history in every direction.