Fargo audiotours

The Coen Brothers' 1996 film was mostly shot in Minnesota, but Fargo got top billing and has made peace with the arrangement. The movie wood chipper is here, in the Fargo-Moorhead Visitors Center, and the TV series kept the name alive for a new generation. The real Fargo -- built on the Red River that forms the North Dakota-Minnesota border -- earned its name as the western terminus of the Northern Pacific Railway in 1872. It grew into the largest city in the Dakotas on the back of bonanza wheat farming, when speculators were running 100,000-acre operations on the flat, impossibly fertile Red River Valley floor.

The Roger Maris Museum inside a West Acres shopping mall sounds like a peculiar arrangement, but it holds an affecting collection from the Fargo-born New York Yankee who hit 61 home runs in 1961, breaking Babe Ruth's record under a cloud of media hostility that Maris never quite escaped.

The Plains Art Museum on Broadway is a legitimately serious institution for a Northern Plains city, and downtown Fargo -- particularly Broadway Avenue and the NP (Northern Pacific) neighborhood -- has become one of the more surprisingly lively stretches of main street in the Upper Midwest.