Sioux Falls, SD

Sioux Falls is named for its founding spectacle: the Big Sioux River dropping over ledges of pink Sioux quartzite in the middle of what is now the largest city of the Dakotas. Falls Park frames the cascades and the ruins of the pioneer mill beside them, and the same rosy stone built the city's Romanesque courthouse and warehouse rows — a prairie town with a distinctly warm-coloured face. Along the downtown streets runs the SculptureWalk, one of the largest annual outdoor sculpture exhibitions in the country, its pieces changed and voted on by the citizens each year.

The city's cultural flagship — and the archive's documented stage — is the Washington Pavilion of Arts and Science, the great 1908 quartzite high school reborn as a cultural centre: its Husby Performing Arts Hall is home to the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra and host to the touring orchestras, opera and Broadway seasons of the northern plains, with a science museum and visual-arts galleries under the same roof — a full city's culture in one converted school. Booming on finance and health care, repeatedly listed among America's most liveable smaller cities, Sioux Falls is the plains' quiet success story, with a waterfall in the middle of it.