Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Garden

Cambridge, MA

May Sarton lived and wrote in Cambridge, Massachusetts, part of a literary community that made the city one of America's great crucibles of letters in the twentieth century. Belgian-born and brought to New England as a child fleeing the upheavals of the First World War, she spent a long career moving between poetry, fiction, and the intimate art of the journal — work that found beauty in solitude, aging, and the interior lives of women. Her chosen epitaph, "maker of bridges between two worlds," captures a writer who linked Old World and New, private feeling and public page.

Boston, MA

This plaque honors Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, Jr., the Cambridge-born son of Boston's Irish Catholic community who rose to become one of the most powerful figures in 20th-century American politics. A New Deal Democrat, he served for decades in the U.S. House of Representatives and held the Speaker's gavel from 1977 to 1987, sparring famously with the Reagan White House while defending Great Society social programs. He is perhaps best remembered for the maxim that came to define his craft: "all politics is local."

Boston, MA

These four lines are among the most famous in Hungarian literature — the poet Sándor Petőfi's ringing pledge that liberty outweighs even love, and that he would give both for his country. Petőfi was the voice of Hungary's 1848 revolution against Habsburg rule, a young writer who turned verse into a rallying cry and, by tradition, vanished in battle at just twenty-six. Monuments bearing his words stand far beyond Hungary, raised by Hungarian communities who carried his poetry with them across the ocean.

Boston, MA

In the early 1950s, Boston's Back Bay was home to a remarkable pair of young students: a Georgia-born theology doctoral candidate at Boston University and an Alabama-raised singer training at the New England Conservatory. Their 1952 introduction and the courtship that followed — carried on between rooming houses along Massachusetts Avenue — would join two lives that reshaped a nation. The League of Women for Community Service, where Coretta boarded, was itself a pillar of Black Boston, a reminder that this romance unfolded within a close, striving community.