Sarah Mitchell

Portland, Maine has a population of 68,000 people. It has more restaurants per capita than any other city in the United States. Not more restaurants per capita than comparable small cities – more than any city, anywhere in the country, including New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. The James Beard Foundation has nominated Portland […]

Palm Springs has a population of around 48,000 people and more mid-century modern architecture per square mile than anywhere else on earth. The city has the highest concentration of preserved 1950s and 1960s residential design in the United States – more than 2,500 documented structures built between 1940 and 1969. Architects like Richard Neutra, Albert

Charleston has 1,400 buildings constructed before 1840 still standing and in active use within the 4.2 miles of the city peninsula. No comparable collection of 18th and early 19th-century American domestic architecture exists anywhere else in the United States outside of New Orleans. Most visitors arrive knowing Charleston has good food and beautiful houses. They

Savannah was Sherman’s Christmas gift. When Union General William Tecumseh Sherman completed his March to the Sea through Georgia in December 1864, he had burned Atlanta, torched Columbia, and destroyed most of what stood in his path across the South. When he reached Savannah, he sent President Lincoln a telegram: “I beg to present you

Tokyo is the world’s largest city and, counterintuitively, one of the easiest large cities to navigate as a visitor from any country. The metropolitan area of 37 million people runs on a transit system so precisely timed that a one-minute delay makes the news. The streets are clean without visible surveillance. The food is better

Key West sits 90 miles north of Cuba and 160 miles southwest of Miami, at the end of a 113-mile chain of islands connected to the Florida mainland by the Overseas Highway one of the great American drives, running across 42 bridges over water so clear and turquoise that the bridges feel suspended between sky

Puerto Rico is the only US territory that is entirely tropical. The only tropical rainforest in the US National Forest System is here, in El Yunque, 40 miles east of San Juan. The bioluminescent bay on Vieques Island is the brightest in the world, holding a Guinness World Record for luminosity. The fortifications of Old

Salt Lake City is the American city that most consistently surprises visitors who arrive with modest expectations. They expect a conservative, religiously homogeneous city in the desert and find something considerably more interesting: a genuinely cosmopolitan mountain city of 200,000 people ringed by one of the finest ski resort concentrations in the world, possessing a

Seattle is the American city that most consistently exceeds expectations. I arrived for the first time in October, which most visitors are warned against, and found a city of extraordinary atmosphere: the light at that time of year comes sideways through low cloud and turns the water of Elliott Bay the color of pewter, the

It was 7 AM on an October morning and I was standing on the Michigan Avenue bridge looking west down the Chicago River. The canyon of buildings on both sides, glass and stone and steel rising 30 and 40 and 50 stories above the water, was catching the first light from the east. The Wrigley