Overland Park, KS

Overland Park is the American suburb perfected and made self-aware. Founded as a streetcar development on the old military road — the "overland park" of its name — it grew after the war into Kansas's second city, a quarter-million people of the Kansas City metropolitan area's prosperous southwest, perennially listed among the best places in the country to live and raise a family: excellent schools, an arboretum of prairie and woodland gardens, a clock-towered farmers' market in its restored downtown, and a corporate skyline of engineering and telecom headquarters along the parkways.

What raises it beyond demography is the campus of Johnson County Community College, one of the largest community colleges in America and an unlikely national arts address: its Carlsen Center — the hall documented in this archive — has presented an ambitious series of world-class orchestras, chamber ensembles, jazz and dance to Kansas City audiences for decades, and beside it the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, one of the largest contemporary museums in the region, gives the suburb a serious collection of its own. A community college with a concert series many capitals would envy is Overland Park's quiet boast — proof that the American suburb, given means and intent, can furnish its own culture rather than commute to it.