Alice the Elephant's 1904 Swim to Staten Island

New York, NY

Robert Richard Randall was a wealthy New York merchant and shipmaster whose 1801 will endowed Sailors' Snug Harbor, a haven for "aged, decrepit, and worn-out" seamen at a time when a life at sea often ended in poverty. The institution his fortune created grew into one of America's first great charitable retirement homes, eventually settling on Staten Island where its stately buildings still stand. Decades after his death, the Harbor's trustees raised this monument over his remains to honor the founder whose generosity had sheltered thousands of sailors.

New York, NY

Long before New York was a city, this shoreline near the Narrows was a lifeline for sailors. Ships crossing the Atlantic in the early 1600s arrived with fouled, dwindling water casks, and a freshwater spring here let their crews refill before pressing on to the trading posts of New Netherland. By the time it appears in the record around 1623 — the very years the Dutch were planting their first settlements in the region — 'the Watering Place' was already a known landfall, a small but essential stop where ocean voyages paused to take on the one thing no ship could sail without.

New York, NY

In turn-of-the-century Brooklyn — Kings County — public life ran on the shoulders of men like William E. Kelly, who climbed the civic ladder one office at a time. He began carrying the mail in 1893, rose to Postmaster in 1914, and then served as County Clerk of Kings County until 1929, a stretch that saw Brooklyn absorbed into Greater New York and swell into one of America's densest, most immigrant-rich cities. The tribute "Honored, Respected and Loved by All" reflects an era when a local postmaster or clerk was a genuine neighborhood figure, the human face of a government that was only beginning to modernize.

Hoboken, NJ

In the postwar decades, Stevens Institute of Technology — the pioneering engineering school perched on the Hoboken waterfront — faced the perennial campus problem of where to house a growing student body on a cramped riverside campus. Its solution was unusually nautical: from 1968 to 1975 a repurposed ship, the SS Stevens, was moored beside the campus and served as a floating dormitory, where undergraduates bunked on the water within sight of the Manhattan skyline. This anchor is a keepsake of that maritime experiment, when heading back to your dorm room meant stepping aboard a ship.