Schenectady, NY

Schenectady called itself "the City that Lights and Hauls the World", and for a century the boast was literal: Thomas Edison moved his machine works here in 1886, General Electric was born and headquartered in the city, and the American Locomotive Company built the engines — electricity and traction from one riverbank on the Mohawk. GE's laboratories made Schenectady a cradle of broadcasting: WGY was among the first radio stations in the world, and the company's experimental television transmissions of 1928 were the first regular broadcasts anywhere.

The city is far older than its industry: the Stockade district, settled by the Dutch in 1661 and bearing the scars of the 1690 French and Indian raid, is a rare surviving colonial quarter of gabled brick, and Union College of 1795 claims the first architecturally planned campus in America. The archive's stage is Proctors — the 1926 vaudeville palace on State Street, its arcade, Wurlitzer and gilded hall restored into the region's performing-arts powerhouse, where Broadway tours, orchestras and opera fill a calendar that anchors the Capital Region's cultural life (the source records' "Proctor's Theatre" now styles itself simply Proctors — a note for the registry). Edison's dynamos are gone; the current, demonstrably, still flows.