Alfred Butts

New York, NY

This 140-foot stainless-steel globe rose over Flushing Meadows as the theme symbol of the 1964–65 New York World's Fair, an exposition themed "Peace Through Understanding" that drew millions to Queens at the height of the Space Age. Donated and engineered by U.S. Steel, its open latticework of continents and orbiting rings captured a moment when Americans looked hopefully toward space exploration and a shrinking, more connected world. After the fair closed it remained in the park, and today it endures as one of the most recognizable landmarks of the New York City skyline's borough of Queens.

New York, NY

In 1921, in the quiet green of Kissena Park, Queens residents raised a "Memorial Knoll" to their neighbors who had died in the Great War just a few years earlier. The United States had entered World War I in 1917, and by the Armistice of November 1918 tens of thousands of New Yorkers had shipped overseas, many never to return. Across the country in the early 1920s, towns and city neighborhoods answered that loss by dedicating parks, groves, and knolls—living memorials meant to be walked through rather than merely looked at.

New York, NY

Fred Christ Trump was born in the Queens neighborhood of Woodhaven in 1905 and, according to this marker, began building as a teenager and raised this store. From those beginnings grew the family real-estate firm E. Trump & Son, later the Trump Organization, which shaped much of the outer-borough housing landscape in the twentieth century. The plaque notes his role as father of Donald Trump.

New York, NY

The dates carved here — 1858 to 1940 — belong to Samuel Untermyer, one of the most formidable lawyers of America's Progressive Era, honored alongside his wife, Minnie. Untermyer built his reputation battling concentrated corporate and financial power, most famously as the driving counsel behind the 1912–1913 congressional inquiry that exposed Wall Street's so-called 'Money Trust.' A fabulously successful attorney turned civic reformer and philanthropist, he transformed his Yonkers estate, Greystone, into the celebrated Untermyer Gardens, while Minnie was a devoted patron of music and the arts.