Stony Brook, NY

Stony Brook is two places in one postcode: a picture-book harbour village on Long Island's North Shore, and a research university of world rank behind it. The village keeps the eighteenth century within reach — the working Stony Brook Grist Mill, the crescent of shops built as one of America's earliest planned shopping villages in 1941, its mechanical eagle flapping its wings above the post office on the hour, and the Long Island Museum's celebrated collection of carriages and William Sidney Mount paintings. This is also Culper country: the farmers and sailors of the surrounding Three Villages ran George Washington's Setauket spy ring, the Revolution's most effective intelligence network, whose codes and dead drops are local heritage.

Stony Brook University, founded in 1957 and risen with startling speed into the front rank of American public research universities — C. N. Yang brought his Nobel physics here, and the university co-manages Brookhaven National Laboratory — supplies the modern half. Its Staller Center for the Arts, the archive's documented stage, is the region's concert hall: an ambitious season of orchestras, chamber music, opera and film festivals for Suffolk County, on a campus of 25,000 students a short walk from the duck pond. Spies, sails and superconductivity: Stony Brook spans the American centuries comfortably.