Springfield Audioguides

Springfield, Massachusetts, has produced two things that shaped American imagination more than the city usually gets credit for: basketball and Dr. Seuss. On December 21, 1891, a Canadian physical education instructor named James Naismith nailed two peach baskets to the balcony of the YMCA Training School on Chestnut Street and invented a new game to keep his students active through winter. The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, which opened its current riverside building in 2002, commemorates that moment on the very site. Theodor Seuss Geisel, who grew up on Fairfield Street and attended Classical High School, channeled the industrial city's particular light and texture into the landscapes of Whoville and the Lorax's Truffula Trees.

The city grew through the 19th century as a manufacturing powerhouse, home to the Springfield Armory, which produced the muskets used in the American Revolution and the rifles that armed Union soldiers in the Civil War.

The Armory, now a National Historic Site, contains one of the largest collections of historic American firearms in the world. The Springfield Museums complex on State Street clusters five institutions together, including the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden, where bronze statues of Geisel's characters stand in an outdoor setting that is, somehow, exactly right.