Margaret Wise Brown

New York, NY

The pioneering landscape gardener Beatrix Farrand (1872–1959) lived here from birth in 1872 until 1913. Over some 192 commissions she shaped the East Garden of the White House, the celebrated grounds of Dumbarton Oaks, and the Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, and served for decades as landscape consultant to the Pierpont Morgan Library. A niece of the writer Edith Wharton, she was among the few women to lead the young profession of landscape architecture.

New York, NY

From 1931 to 1942 the novelist and diarist Dawn Powell lived at this Greenwich Village address, turning out sharp comic novels like Turn, Magic Wheel and A Time to Be Born. An Ohio transplant, she made a career of skewering both small-town Midwestern life and the glittering ambitions of New York. Nearly forgotten at her death in 1965, Powell found an ardent new readership in the 1990s.

New York, NY

This chapel stands on the site of the home where Elizabeth Ann Seton lived with her family from 1801 to 1803 and where her daughter Rebecca was born. A wife, mother, and educator, Seton went on to found the Sisters of Charity, the first American congregation of religious sisters. In 1975 she was canonized as the first native-born citizen of the United States to be declared a saint.

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.