New Dorp World War II Memorial

Town of Oyster Bay, NY

For more than half a century, Edith Hay Wyckoff chronicled life on Long Island's Gold Coast from the newsroom of The Locust Valley Leader, the weekly paper she edited and published from the close of World War II until 2001. In an era when few women owned or ran newspapers, she made the Leader a record of her community's births, deaths, controversies, and small triumphs. In 1946 she also founded the Locust Valley Boys Club, extending her civic reach from the printed page to the lives of local youth.

Southington, CT

This monument honors the residents of Southington, Connecticut who served in the nation's three great mid-twentieth-century conflicts: World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam Conflict. Together these wars swept up a generation of small-town Americans, sending men and women from a modest Connecticut manufacturing community to Europe, the Pacific, the Korean peninsula, and Southeast Asia. Memorials like this one became a fixture of New England town greens in the postwar decades, a communal way to keep the names and sacrifices of neighbors present in daily civic life.

New York, NY

In 1965, the wooded hills of Staten Island's High Rock Park became a rallying point for one of New York City's earliest grassroots conservation fights, and Gretta Moulton stood at its center. Her campaign helped spare the land from development and seeded the far larger effort to protect the Staten Island Greenbelt, a sprawling patchwork of forest and wetland set improbably within the nation's largest city. Moulton also served as a trustee of the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences, linking the borough's cultural life to the stewardship of its landscape. This gate stands as a quiet tribute to a citizen-organizer whose work outlasted her.

New York, NY

In the bitter winter of 1944, German forces launched their last great offensive on the Western Front, striking through the snow-covered Ardennes forest and bulging deep into Allied lines — the shape that gave the Battle of the Bulge its name. American soldiers, often outnumbered and surrounded, held key crossroads and eventually turned the assault back, in what became one of the largest and costliest engagements U.S. forces fought in Europe. This Staten Island plaza was dedicated on December 16, 2001 — the anniversary of the day that battle began — naming a piece of the New York cityscape in honor of the men who endured it.