William E. Kelly Monument

New York, NY

On November 12, 2001, American Airlines Flight 587 broke apart shortly after taking off from nearby John F. Kennedy Airport, bound for Santo Domingo, and came down in the Belle Harbor neighborhood of the Rockaway Peninsula. All 260 people aboard and 5 on the ground were killed, making it one of the deadliest aviation disasters in American history. Coming just two months after the September 11 attacks, the crash first raised fears of another act of terror before investigators traced it to a structural failure of the aircraft's tail. Because so many aboard were Dominican New Yorkers traveling home, the loss struck the city's Dominican community with particular force, and this quiet seaside memorial — inscribed with a line of verse in Spanish and English — was raised in their memory.

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

Robert Richard Randall was a wealthy New York merchant and shipmaster whose 1801 will endowed Sailors' Snug Harbor, a haven for "aged, decrepit, and worn-out" seamen at a time when a life at sea often ended in poverty. The institution his fortune created grew into one of America's first great charitable retirement homes, eventually settling on Staten Island where its stately buildings still stand. Decades after his death, the Harbor's trustees raised this monument over his remains to honor the founder whose generosity had sheltered thousands of sailors.

New York, NY

On the morning of June 15, 1904, the excursion steamer General Slocum caught fire in the East River while carrying more than a thousand passengers on a church outing. Most aboard were German immigrant families from Manhattan's Lower East Side neighborhood known as Little Germany, and the flames spread with terrible speed as rotted life preservers and unready lifeboats failed those on deck. The loss of over a thousand lives made it the deadliest day in New York City until the attacks of September 11, 2001.