Jane Jakons Plaque

Clinton, CT

During the War of 1812, the British blockaded Long Island Sound and raided the small shipbuilding and fishing towns strung along the Connecticut shore, forcing coastal communities like Clinton to organize their own defenses against landing parties and enemy warships. This weathered cannon stands as a relic of that anxious era, when local militia and volunteers kept watch over the water. More than a century later, in 1925, the Women's Relief Corps dedicated the piece to honor the townspeople who had answered the call to guard their coast.

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

Along this walk, a living memorial of trees was planted to honor the great sea fights of World War II — from the surprise blow at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 through the carrier duels at the Coral Sea and Midway in 1942, the desperate night actions off Guadalcanal at Savo Island and Cape Esperance, the far-northern clash near the Komandorski Islands, and the climactic Pacific battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf. Dedicated in the mid-1940s, the tablet turns a quiet promenade into a roll call of the naval engagements that decided the war at sea. Each named battle marks a turning point where American and Allied fleets blunted and then rolled back Axis power across two oceans.

New York, NY

In the Conservatory Garden at the north end of Central Park stands a quiet bronze fountain honoring Frances Hodgson Burnett, the English-born American author whose children's books—most enduringly The Secret Garden—shaped generations of young readers. The fountain's two children, a boy playing a flute and a girl holding a bowl, echo Mary and Dickon from that beloved 1911 novel, set in a walled garden much like the one that surrounds them here. Dedicated in the 1930s after Burnett's death, the memorial was a gift meant for the children of the city, tying the author's imaginative world to a real public garden they could wander.