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Metro Center, Springfield, Massachusetts
Metro Center is the original colonial settlement of Springfield, Massachusetts, located beside a bend in the Connecticut River. As of 2019, Metro Center features a majority of Western Massachusetts' most important cultural, business, and civic venues.Zimmerman/Volk AssociatesResidential Market Potential, Downtown Springfield for City of Springfield, December 2006 Metro Center includes Springfield's Central Business District, its Club Quarter, its government center, its convention headquarters, and in recent years, it has become an increasingly popular residential district, especially among young professionals, empty-nesters, and creative types, with a population of approximately 7,000 (2010.) Metro Center is physically separated from the Connecticut River by Interstate 91 – a 1958 urban renewal project that separated the city from its riverfront. Early history It is difficult to estimate the origins of human habitation in the Connecticut River Valley, but there are physical sig ...
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George Washington
George Washington (February 22, 1732, 1799) was an American military officer, statesman, and Founding Father who served as the first president of the United States from 1789 to 1797. Appointed by the Continental Congress as commander of the Continental Army, Washington led the Patriot forces to victory in the American Revolutionary War and served as the president of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which created the Constitution of the United States and the American federal government. Washington has been called the " Father of his Country" for his manifold leadership in the formative days of the country. Washington's first public office was serving as the official surveyor of Culpeper County, Virginia, from 1749 to 1750. Subsequently, he received his first military training (as well as a command with the Virginia Regiment) during the French and Indian War. He was later elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses and was named a delegate to the Continental Congress ...
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Springfield Symphony Orchestra
The Springfield Symphony Orchestra is an American orchestra based in Springfield, Massachusetts. It performs at Symphony Hall, a part of the Springfield Municipal Group. The Springfield Symphony (SSO) got its start when the conductor of the amateur Pioneer Valley Symphony of Greenfield, Alexander Leslie, decided he was ready to lead a professional organization. After gaining the support of the area cultural and business communities, Leslie began to assemble an orchestra based in Springfield, which had no professional orchestra. The SSO performed its first concert at the Municipal Auditorium in 1944. Its first performance was given great reviews and even recorded by the Office of War Information for rebroadcast overseas. The SSO has throughout its history support musical education programs in the Greater Springfield area. Today, the SSO is the largest symphony in Massachusetts outside of Boston, and was described by D. Antoinette Handy, a former music director of the Na ...
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Symphony Hall, Springfield
The Municipal Group of Springfield, Massachusetts is a collection of three prominent municipal buildings in the city's Metro Center district. Consisting of a concert hall, City Hall, and a clocktower, the Group is a center of government and culture in the city. The Municipal Complex's architecture is a notable example of the City Beautiful style made popular by Daniel Burnham, an architect from Chicago, Illinois, in the early 20th century. Layout Bounded by Court and Pynchon Streets, East Columbus Ave, and City Hall Place, the Municipal Group consists of two Greek Revival buildings which house City Hall and Symphony Hall, originally built as the Municipal Auditorium. Between the two is the Italianate Campanile clock tower. With a carillon of twelve bells, it plays sixteen notes of Handel's ''Messiah''. The face of the clock is fourteen feet in diameter. When originally built, the clock and elevator were powered by water. The Municipal Group looks out onto Court Square an ...
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Connecticut River Valley
The Connecticut River is the longest river in the New England region of the United States, flowing roughly southward for through four states. It rises 300 yards (270 m) south of the U.S. border with Quebec, Canada, and discharges at Long Island Sound. Its watershed encompasses , covering parts of five U.S. states and one Canadian province, via 148 tributaries, 38 of which are major rivers. It produces 70% of Long Island Sound's fresh water, discharging at per second. The Connecticut River Valley is home to some of the northeastern United States' most productive farmland, as well as the Hartford–Springfield Knowledge Corridor, a metropolitan region of approximately two million people surrounding Springfield, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut. History The word "Connecticut" is a corruption of the Mohegan word ''quinetucket'', which means "beside the long, tidal river". The word came into English during the early 1600s to name the river, which was also called simply "Th ...
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Planetarium
A planetarium ( planetariums or ''planetaria'') is a theatre built primarily for presenting educational and entertaining shows about astronomy and the night sky, or for training in celestial navigation. A dominant feature of most planetariums is the large dome-shaped projection screen onto which scenes of stars, planets, and other celestial objects can be made to appear and move realistically to simulate their motion. The projection can be created in various ways, such as a star ball, slide projector, video, fulldome projector systems, and lasers. Typical systems can be set to simulate the sky at any point in time, past or present, and often to depict the night sky as it would appear from any point of latitude on Earth. Planetaria range in size from the 37 meter dome in St. Petersburg, Russia (called “Planetarium No 1”) to three-meter inflatable portable domes where attendees sit on the floor. The largest planetarium in the Western Hemisphere is the Jennifer Chalsty Plan ...
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James McNeill Whistler
James Abbott McNeill Whistler (; July 10, 1834July 17, 1903) was an American painter active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in the United Kingdom. He eschewed sentimentality and moral allusion in painting and was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His signature for his paintings took the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger for a tail. The symbol combined both aspects of his personality: his art is marked by a subtle delicacy, while his public persona was combative. He found a parallel between painting and music, and entitled many of his paintings "arrangements", "harmonies", and "nocturnes", emphasizing the primacy of tonal harmony. His most famous painting, ''Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1'' (1871), commonly known as ''Whistler's Mother'', is a revered and often parodied portrait of motherhood. Whistler influenced the art world and the broader culture of his time with his theories and his friendships with other lea ...
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Post-Impressionist
Post-Impressionism (also spelled Postimpressionism) was a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction against Impressionists' concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and colour. Its broad emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content means Post-Impressionism encompasses Les Nabis, Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Cloisonnism, the Pont-Aven School, and Synthetism, along with some later Impressionists' work. The movement's principal artists were Paul Cézanne (known as the father of Post-Impressionism), Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Georges Seurat. The term Post-Impressionism was first used by art critic Roger Fry in 1906.Peter Morrin, Judith Zilczer, William C. Agee, ''The Advent of Modernism. Post-Impressionism and North American Art, 1900-1918'', High Museum of Art, 1986 Critic Frank Rutter in a review of the Salon d'Automne ...
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Impressionist
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, unusual visual angles, and inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s. The Impressionists faced harsh opposition from the conventional art community in France. The name of the style derives from the title of a Claude Monet work, ''Impression, soleil levant'' (''Impression, Sunrise''), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satirical review published in the Parisian newspaper ''Le Charivari''. The development of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous styles in other media that beca ...
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Quadrangle (Springfield, Massachusetts)
The Quadrangle is the common name for a cluster of museums and cultural institutions in Metro Center, Springfield, Massachusetts, on Chestnut Street between State and Edwards Streets. The Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden, in the center of the Quadrangle, is surrounded by a park, a library, five museums, and a cathedral. A second cathedral is just on the Quadrangle's periphery. Merrick Park On the corner of Chestnut and State Streets, Merrick Park is distinguished by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens ''The Puritan'', a statue depicting one of Springfield's settlers, Deacon Samuel Chapin. Springfield Central Library and Christ Church Cathedral are adjacent to the park. Springfield City Library The Central Library, constructed in 1913, was paid for by Andrew Carnegie. It is the second library to be built at that location. The nonfiction department is based in Rice Hall (named for William Rice), consisting of a main floor and mezzanine. Opposite Rice Hall is the A ...
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National Park
A national park is a nature park, natural park in use for conservation (ethic), conservation purposes, created and protected by national governments. Often it is a reserve of natural, semi-natural, or developed land that a sovereign state declares or owns. Although individual nations designate their own national parks differently, there is a common idea: the conservation of 'wild nature' for posterity and as a symbol of national pride. The United States established the first "public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people", Yellowstone National Park, in 1872. Although Yellowstone was not officially termed a "national park" in its establishing law, it was always termed such in practice and is widely held to be the first and oldest national park in the world. However, the Tobago Main Ridge Forest Reserve (in what is now Trinidad and Tobago; established in 1776), and the area surrounding Bogd Khan Mountain, Bogd Khan Uul Mountain (Mongolia, 1778), wh ...
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Springfield Armory
The Springfield Armory, more formally known as the United States Armory and Arsenal at Springfield located in the city of Springfield, Massachusetts, was the primary center for the manufacture of United States military firearms from 1777 until its closing in 1968. It was the first federal armory and one of the first factories in the United States dedicated to the manufacture of weapons. The site is preserved as the Springfield Armory National Historic Site, Western Massachusetts' only unit of the National Park Service, national park system. It features the world's largest collection of historic American firearms. Famous first as the United States' primary arsenal during the American Revolutionary War, and then as the scene of a confrontation during Shays' Rebellion, the Springfield Armory in the 19th and 20th centuries became the site of numerous technological innovations of global importance, including interchangeable parts, the assembly line style of mass production, and moder ...
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