Founder's Memorial (Vlaho Bukovac Painting)

New York, NY

In the old village of Eltingville on Staten Island, this small Episcopal parish—first known as the Church of the Holy Comforter—rose in the mid-nineteenth century as a rural house of worship. Its board-and-batten wooden siding is a hallmark of the Gothic Revival ideas then reshaping American country churches, where prominent tastemakers urged simple, picturesque wooden buildings suited to their landscape. As farming hamlets like Eltingville grew, a modest frame church such as this one anchored community life long before the surrounding countryside gave way to the modern city.

Keyport, NJ

In the years surrounding World War I, communities across America planted living "memorial trees" to honor the local men who died in the fighting of 1917–1918 — a quiet, growing alternative to stone and bronze. This tribute in Keyport, a small bayside town on the New Jersey shore, remembers Private William Senson, who died in service on September 19, 1918, only weeks before the November armistice brought the war to a close. Nearly every town of the era carried such losses home, and marked them wherever neighbors would pass and remember.

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

The Statue of Liberty's famous copper skin was mined an ocean away, at a copper works on the Norwegian island of Karmøy. In 1986, to mark the statue's centennial, the people of Karmøy chose a stone from that very mine and sent it across the Atlantic aboard the tall ship Sørlandet as a gift to the United States. Set near the harbor that frames Lady Liberty, the stone turns an abstract fact — where the metal came from — into something you can stand beside and touch.