General Worth Monument

New York, NY

This monument marks lower Manhattan ground where the Congress of the Confederation sat in the 1780s, when New York City served as the young nation's capital. On July 13, 1787, that Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, a landmark law organizing the vast territory north and west of the Ohio River. It laid out how raw frontier land would be surveyed, settled, and eventually admitted to the Union — and famously encouraged schools and the spread of knowledge across that new country.

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.

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.

Newark, NJ

In 1919, Newark opened a college dedicated to training engineers, part of a national surge in technical education as American industry mechanized and cities expanded. Over the following century the school grew into a cornerstone of engineering and applied science in New Jersey, anchoring what became a major public technological university. This monument and its accompanying time capsule, sealed in 2019 and meant to be opened in 2119, mark that hundred-year milestone as a gift from one generation of engineers to the next.