West Lafayette, IN

West Lafayette is Purdue University's town, and Purdue is the Cradle of Astronauts: the first and the last men to walk on the Moon — Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan — both took their degrees here, along with more than two dozen other astronauts, and Amelia Earhart spent her final years on the faculty, her round-the-world Electra funded by the university. The campus above the Wabash carries the aerospace swagger lightly, alongside the engineering and agricultural programmes that made the Boilermakers a world brand.

It also holds one of the largest theatres on earth: the Edward C. Elliott Hall of Music — its name garbled across two sentences in the source records (a note for the registry) — seats over 6,000 beneath a single roof, a Depression-era colossus larger than Radio City's auditorium in seating, where convocations, touring orchestras, opera companies and every variety of spectacle have played to the university city since 1940; the hall documented in this archive is thus among the biggest rooms in which any touring company can find itself in America. Across the river lies the sister city of Lafayette, sharing the name of the Revolution's French hero. Rocket science, a colossal hall and the Wabash below: West Lafayette thinks in large dimensions.