Pasadena, CA

Pasadena begins each American year: since 1890 the Rose Parade has rolled down Colorado Boulevard every New Year's morning, its floats built entirely of flowers and seeds, followed by the Rose Bowl, the "Granddaddy" of football games in the stadium of the same name — a winter garden party invented by transplanted Easterners to advertise the California sun. The city they built beneath the San Gabriels became one of the most cultivated in the West: the Gamble House, the Greene brothers' 1908 masterpiece of the Arts and Crafts, the Norton Simon Museum's Old Masters and Degas bronzes, and Old Pasadena's restored blocks.

Its intellect is world-class: Caltech has counted dozens of Nobel laureates on its small campus — Einstein wintered here in the 1930s — and manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the hills above. Musically, Pasadena once held the "Carnegie Hall of the West": the Ambassador Auditorium, where Karajan, Horowitz and the world's finest appeared for a generation. The archive's documented venue is more intimate — the Neighborhood Church, the landmark congregation beside the Arroyo whose sanctuary and gardens have long hosted concerts and community music, a fitting Pasadena address where science, roses and Bach share the same mild air.