If you like culture and road trips, I think my town of State College, PA is the best place in America to live! You can see more culture in a reasonable drive from here than from anywhere else.

Locals like to say that State College is “centrally isolated”: we aren’t near anything, but there are lots of cities with good culture all 3-4 hours away (almost like they’re avoiding us!) So when we moved here, Julia and I agreed we would not fear the road trip!

Now Central PA has plenty of charms, especially if you’re an outdoorsy type (we’re the fly fishing capital of the world, there’s Amish Country nearby, State College itself gets plenty of culture at our theaters and big arena, etc., etc.). But in all honesty, it’s probably not all that much more than a typical town or city with a large university. So that’s not what I mean. Obviously, if you want to spend a few days soaking up cultural experiences, it’s better to be in a big city.

A reasonable road trip is about 4 hours. That’s long enough to count as a road trip, but short enough that you don’t lose a whole day to travel, it’s possible to make the trip in a single shot, if you like, and there’s no reason to fly. So that’s our radius: 4 hours on the road. That gives us New York, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. That’s a lot!

In fact, I think State College has access to more great cultural experiences than any other place in America.

To quantify this, we need a proxy for “culture.” I’ll choose NFL and MLB stadiums, not because sports==culture, but because active major league stadia are an easy-to-count proxy for “cultural things to do”. A city with more than one stadium probably has more culture than one with only one (New York City > Buffalo). It’s imperfect, but simple.

So get this: there are fourteen such stadia within a 4 hours’ drive of State College*! 7 MLB, 7 NFL— that is almost a quarter of all of them! We can reach Pittsburgh and Cleveland to the West, Buffalo to the North, and all of the big Eastern Seaboard cities from Washington up except Boston.

I think these numbers are higher than anywhere else in the North America (in both either league and in total). I taught myself the Google Maps API to calculate this properly. My function accepts a location and a driving range, and it returns the number of stadia within that range.

It’s very slow, so I can’t make a proper contour map of the US, so this means I can’t prove that State College is the global maximum in the US, but spot checking elsewhere shows nowhere else comes even close.

If you have another candidate location for a local or global maximum, let me know!

In the meantime, on behalf of Centre County I’m declaring us the cultural capital of the United States.

*Technically, Citi Field is 4h6m from my house, so my radius is 4h6m, not 4 hours even. Bellefonte and many nearby points north on I-99 have 14 stadia within less than 4 hours flat, and the local minimum time to all 14 is probably somewhere near the I-99/I-80 interchange.