Tyler, TX

Tyler is the Rose Capital of America, and the title is horticultural fact: for a century the fields of Smith County have grown a substantial share of the nation's rose bushes, and the Tyler Municipal Rose Garden — fourteen acres and tens of thousands of bushes — is the largest of its kind in the country. Every October the Texas Rose Festival crowns its queen in a coronation of legendary gowns, a piece of East Texas pageantry maintained since 1933; in spring the azalea trails through the brick-streeted historic districts turn the whole town into a garden.

The city beneath the flowers is the metropolis of East Texas's piney woods — oil-boom money from the great East Texas field of the 1930s built its banks and mansions, and health care and education sustain it now. The University of Texas at Tyler carries the concert tradition: its Cowan Center — the R. Don Cowan Fine and Performing Arts Center, recorded in this archive under a slightly garbled form of the name (a note for the registry) — opened in 1997 as the region's principal hall, presenting touring Broadway, orchestras and distinguished soloists to audiences from across the piney woods. Roses, azaleas, oil and an opera-ready stage: Tyler is East Texas in bloom.