Nikola Tesla

New York, NY

The Statue of Liberty's famous copper skin was mined an ocean away, at a copper works on the Norwegian island of Karmøy. In 1986, to mark the statue's centennial, the people of Karmøy chose a stone from that very mine and sent it across the Atlantic aboard the tall ship Sørlandet as a gift to the United States. Set near the harbor that frames Lady Liberty, the stone turns an abstract fact — where the metal came from — into something you can stand beside and touch.

New York, NY

Alfred Tredway White was a Brooklyn merchant and philanthropist of the Gilded Age whose name became synonymous with the idea that decent housing was a civic duty. In an era when the working poor of America's booming industrial cities were crowded into airless, unsanitary tenements, White financed model apartment blocks built around courtyards and open stairwells to bring in light and air, insisting they still earn a modest return so the model could be copied. A devoted supporter of parks, gardens, and public institutions, he lived by the creed carved here — a lover of nature and a helper of mankind.

New York, NY

This 140-foot stainless-steel globe rose over Flushing Meadows as the theme symbol of the 1964–65 New York World's Fair, an exposition themed "Peace Through Understanding" that drew millions to Queens at the height of the Space Age. Donated and engineered by U.S. Steel, its open latticework of continents and orbiting rings captured a moment when Americans looked hopefully toward space exploration and a shrinking, more connected world. After the fair closed it remained in the park, and today it endures as one of the most recognizable landmarks of the New York City skyline's borough of Queens.

Village of Irvington, NY

In an age when a message could only cross the ocean as fast as a ship could carry it, the New York financier Cyrus W. Field spent years and several heartbreaking failures trying to lay a telegraph cable across the floor of the Atlantic. His persistence paid off in 1866, when a working line finally linked North America and Europe and let words leap between continents in minutes rather than weeks. Field made his home in the Hudson River village of Irvington, which honored its most famous resident by naming this road for him and dedicating it in December 1931.