Aurora, Colorado

Aurora spreads across the high plains just east of Denver, sitting around 5,400 feet on the same shelf of grassland that rolls eastward toward Kansas. Most of the city looks the part of a Front Range suburb, but it is big enough and old enough to be its own thing entirely, reaching into three counties at once: Arapahoe, Adams, and Douglas. It was incorporated in 1891 as the town of Fletcher, named for Donald Fletcher, a Denver real-estate promoter who, with his partners, staked out four square miles of prairie during the silver boom. When the Silver Crash of 1893 wrecked Colorado's mining economy, Fletcher sold out and left, sticking the young community with a sizable water debt. The residents shed his name in 1907 and chose Aurora instead, after one of the local subdivisions and the Roman goddess of the dawn.

What turned Aurora from a prairie suburb into a real city was the U.S. Army. In 1918 the Army opened a general hospital here to treat soldiers injured by chemical weapons in World War I, drawn in part by Colorado's reputation for treating lung disease. Renamed Fitzsimons in 1920 after Lt. William T. Fitzsimons, the first American medical officer killed in that war, it grew into one of the Army's major hospitals, and in 1955 it had its brush with history: President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack while in the Denver area and spent about seven weeks recovering in a suite on the eighth floor of its main building, Building 500. The Army closed Fitzsimons in 1996, but the campus didn't go quiet. It was redeveloped as the University of Colorado's Anschutz Medical Campus, now a hub for medical research and teaching hospitals, with the old hospital tower still standing at its center.