Dylan Thomas

New York, NY

The sprawling, autobiographical novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900–1936) spent the last years of his short life at the Chelsea Hotel, the Manhattan haven for writers and artists. Author of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, he poured out prose of enormous ambition and emotional force before dying at just thirty-seven. His American publishers, Scribner's and Harper, placed this plaque to honor him where he had lived and worked.

New York, NY

In 1822, in a mansion that once stood on this site, scholar Clement Clarke Moore wrote "A Visit from St. Nicholas" as a Christmas gift for his children—the poem that gave America much of its modern image of Santa Claus. A professor of Greek and Hebrew, Moore also helped shape the neighborhood of Chelsea, donating land for St. Peter's Church and the General Theological Seminary.

New York, NY

This granite obelisk at the crossing of Fifth Avenue and Broadway honors William Jenkins Worth, a soldier from Hudson, New York, whose career traced the young republic's expanding military ambitions. He earned his commission in the War of 1812, spent the 1820s shaping the officer corps as Commandant of Cadets at West Point, and won his greatest fame in the hard-fought campaigns of the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. When he died in 1849, the city he served brought him home, and the monument that rose over his grave became one of the very few burial sites in Manhattan marked by a public memorial.

New York, NY

Charles Ives (1874–1954) led a double life at this address from 1908 to 1911: a successful insurance executive by day and one of America's most daring composers by night. Drawing on hymns, marches, and folk tunes, his adventurous works—like the Concord Sonata and the Fourth Symphony—stretched rhythm and tonality far beyond the conventions of his era. Long underappreciated, his music later won recognition as strikingly ahead of its time.