Brendan Behan and Hotel Chelsea, New York

New York, NY · est. 1977

On January 7, 1943, the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla died in New York City at the age of eighty-six. A pioneer of alternating-current electricity, Tesla's discoveries in the field of AC power helped carry the United States and the world into the modern industrial age. This marker was placed in 1977 by the Yugoslav-American Bicentennial Committee.

New York, NY

This plaque marks the room in Manhattan's Hotel New Yorker where Nikola Tesla, the visionary Serbian-American inventor, spent his final years and died alone in January 1943. Decades earlier Tesla had helped win the 'War of the Currents,' championing the alternating-current systems that made it practical to transmit electricity across long distances and light entire cities. By the time he died in near-poverty, the AC power grids he pioneered had become the invisible backbone of modern life. The marker turns an ordinary hotel address into the last chapter of one of history's great inventive minds.

New York, NY

By the 1840s New York was a booming commercial city drawing waves of immigrants, and reformer Townsend Harris believed their children deserved a shot at higher learning. In 1849 his campaign bore fruit here with the opening of the Free Academy—a tuition-free public college "for the poor man's children"—which began with a class of 149. Renamed the College of the City of New York in 1866, it grew into today's Baruch College, a global name in business education.

New York, NY

The anarchist, orator, and free-speech advocate Emma Goldman lived at this address from 1903 to 1913, the years in which she published her influential radical magazine Mother Earth. A fierce champion of free speech and free love, she became one of the most watched and controversial voices in Progressive-era America. In 1919, amid the Red Scare, the government deported her to the Soviet Union.