Randall’s Grave

New York, NY

Long before New York was a city, this shoreline near the Narrows was a lifeline for sailors. Ships crossing the Atlantic in the early 1600s arrived with fouled, dwindling water casks, and a freshwater spring here let their crews refill before pressing on to the trading posts of New Netherland. By the time it appears in the record around 1623 — the very years the Dutch were planting their first settlements in the region — 'the Watering Place' was already a known landfall, a small but essential stop where ocean voyages paused to take on the one thing no ship could sail without.

New York, NY

In 1904, so the story goes, a circus elephant named Alice bolted from Coney Island and swam across the harbor to Staten Island — a piece of turn-of-the-century local lore from the era when traveling circuses and seaside amusement parks like Coney Island were among America's grandest popular entertainments. This plaque doesn't claim to be a solemn historical monument so much as a fond nod to that legend, celebrating an unlikely animal escape that has lingered in Staten Island memory. Its keepers pay tribute by giving their own elephant the same name, keeping the tale alive for a new generation.

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 a modest 1842 rowhouse on Hudson Street, the writer and urbanist Jane Jacobs spent two decades observing the everyday life of Greenwich Village from her own front stoop. Her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, drew on that street-level view to challenge the mid-century orthodoxy of slum clearance and expressway-building, arguing that dense, mixed-use neighborhoods were assets to protect rather than blight to erase. From this address she also helped organize the grassroots campaigns that closed Washington Square to through traffic and blocked Robert Moses' proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, a highway that would have leveled swaths of SoHo and the Village.