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Worcester sits at the geographic center of New England, equidistant from Boston, Providence, Hartford, and Springfield, and has spent most of its history being underestimated by all of them. The city grew through the 19th century as a manufacturing center for textiles, wire, and machine tools, and its Canal District along the Blackstone Canal, which connected Worcester to Providence and the sea in 1828, shows the bones of that industrial era in its brick mill buildings now converted to apartments and restaurants. The Worcester Art Museum on Salisbury Street, founded in 1898, has an encyclopedic collection that routinely surprises visitors expecting something parochial: Gauguin, El Greco, Monet, and a complete ancient Roman mosaic floor transported stone by stone from Antioch.

Elm Park, opened in 1854 on the design of Calvert Vaux (who later co-designed Central Park with Frederick Law Olmsted), was the first publicly funded municipal park in the United States.

The claim is fiercely held in Worcester and vigorously disputed by other cities, but the park is lovely regardless. Clark University on Main Street, founded in 1887 as the first purely graduate institution in the country, invited Sigmund Freud to deliver his only American lectures in 1909, an event commemorated by a bronze plaque on campus. The Salisbury Mansion, built in 1772, is one of the finest colonial house museums in Massachusetts.