The Gate

If summer is the busiest season for Wolf Trap National Park in Vienna, July is its busiest month. Philanthropist Catherine Filene Shouse donated 100 acres of farmland to build America's only national park for the performing arts in 1966. Later she donated the land and funds for an indoor theater made from two adjacent 18th-century barns. The Filene Center, the park's main venue, "where the arts come out to play," opened in 1971 and hosts roughly 90 concerts from May through September.