Frances Hodgson Burnett Memorial Fountain

New York, NY

Betty Smith drew on her own hardscrabble girlhood in Brooklyn's Williamsburg tenements to write "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," the beloved 1943 novel of a bookish girl coming of age amid the poverty and stubborn hope of early-1900s immigrant New York. The book became an instant bestseller, and its 1945 film adaptation — a landmark of American cinema — earned Academy Award recognition. This house, later restored, is where the author lived and worked as that enduring story took shape.

New York, NY

In 1899, as the free public library movement swept American cities, Queens resident Ella Flanders — a member of the civic-minded 20th Century Club — launched a free circulating library out of Arcanum Hall on Jamaica Avenue, planting the seed of what became the Richmond Hill Branch of the Queens Borough Public Library. Women's clubs like hers were the quiet engines behind countless early American libraries, raising funds and stocking shelves at a time when tax-supported reading rooms were still a novelty. Among its first trustees was Jacob Riis, the reformer and photojournalist whose exposés of tenement life had made the case that knowledge and opportunity should reach every neighborhood.

City of Glen Cove, NY

In November 1937, on what would have been Marie Curie's 70th birthday, the Polish community of Glen Cove and their neighbors gathered to dedicate a living memorial — a tree and a bronze tablet — to the Warsaw-born scientist who had died just three years earlier. Curie, honored here as the 'Mother of Radium,' had shared a Nobel Prize in Physics and later won a second in Chemistry, pioneering the study of radioactivity that reshaped both science and medicine. The tree was a gift of Mrs. Harold I. Pratt, part of the wealthy family whose estates defined Long Island's Gold Coast, while the tablet came from Glen Cove's Polish residents proud to claim her as their own.

New York, NY

At the turn of the twentieth century, a young Russian Orthodox churchman led his faith's growing North American flock from New York City, serving as archbishop from 1898 to 1907 and helping consecrate St. Nicholas Cathedral as its spiritual anchor. He guided a scattered immigrant community of Russians, Serbs, Greeks, and Alaskan Orthodox believers during an era of massive immigration, translating liturgy and organizing far-flung parishes across the continent. After returning home he was elected Patriarch of Moscow in 1917, the first in generations, just as the Russian Revolution engulfed the Church he now led.