Untermyer Memorial Fountain

New York, NY

This plaque marks the room in Manhattan's Hotel New Yorker where Nikola Tesla, the visionary Serbian-American inventor, spent his final years and died alone in January 1943. Decades earlier Tesla had helped win the 'War of the Currents,' championing the alternating-current systems that made it practical to transmit electricity across long distances and light entire cities. By the time he died in near-poverty, the AC power grids he pioneered had become the invisible backbone of modern life. The marker turns an ordinary hotel address into the last chapter of one of history's great inventive minds.

New York, NY

New York Life Insurance Company is one of America's oldest and largest mutual insurers, its Manhattan headquarters a fixture of the nation's financial life since the 19th century. On Memorial Day, May 30, 1946, the company's own American Legion chapter — NYLIC Post 503 — dedicated this memorial to the employees who had left their desks to serve in the armed forces in wartime, most recently the millions of Americans just home from the Second World War. Corporate honor rolls like this bloomed across the country after both World Wars, as businesses reckoned with how many of their own had gone to fight.

New York, NY

On a commanding ridge in Upper Manhattan, Fort Tryon Park overlooks the Hudson from land that industrialist-philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. assembled and gave to New York City, with the park opening in the mid-1930s. This plaque records a further gift in 1941, when Rockefeller set aside ground to enlarge the park with a children's playground. It reflects an era when private benefactors shaped great American public spaces — the same Rockefeller generosity that also brought the Cloisters museum to the park's northern end.

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.