Poughkeepsie, NY

Poughkeepsie — the Wappinger name means "the reed-covered lodge by the little water place" — is the Queen City of the Hudson, halfway between New York and Albany, and for a few months in 1788 it was effectively the state capital: New York ratified the federal Constitution here. Its modern emblem is triumphantly horizontal: the Walkway Over the Hudson, a mile-and-a-quarter railroad bridge of 1889 reborn in 2009 as the longest elevated pedestrian bridge in the world, striding across the river sixty metres above the water.

The city's crown of learning is Vassar College, founded in 1861 as one of the pioneering colleges for women and long since among America's finest liberal-arts institutions, its Gothic campus and superb art collection just beyond the city line. The archive's stage is the Bardavon 1869 Opera House, among the oldest continuously operating theatres in New York State — a gilded survivor where Mark Twain lectured and the Hudson Valley Philharmonic now makes its home, presenting orchestras, opera and touring artists beneath its historic Wurlitzer organ. Add the Culinary Institute of America a few minutes upriver and Franklin Roosevelt's Hyde Park estate beyond it, and Poughkeepsie anchors one of the most storied stretches of river landscape in America.