435 markers in the database — showing 121–180.
New York, NY
From 1933 to 1942, Eleanor Roosevelt kept a residence at 20 East 11th Street in Greenwich Village during the years her husband occupied the White House. It offered her a foothold in New York even as she remade the role of First Lady into one of activism and public advocacy. The plaque marks the address as one of her city homes.
New York, NY
This chapel stands on the site of the home where Elizabeth Ann Seton lived with her family from 1801 to 1803 and where her daughter Rebecca was born. A wife, mother, and educator, Seton went on to found the Sisters of Charity, the first American congregation of religious sisters. In 1975 she was canonized as the first native-born citizen of the United States to be declared a saint.
New York, NY
From 1919 to 1946, Ellen Biddle Shipman lived and worked at 21 Beekman Place, running one of the most sought-after landscape design practices in the country. Celebrated in her lifetime as the 'dean of women landscape architects,' she shaped gardens for elite clients while championing women in her profession. Her studio here produced designs that carried her reputation nationwide.
New York, NY · est. 1965
In the great hall, arrivals were inspected, questioned, and — for nearly all — admitted to begin new lives. Ellis Island became the symbol of America as a nation of immigrants.
New York, NY
The anarchist, orator, and free-speech advocate Emma Goldman lived at this address from 1903 to 1913, the years in which she published her influential radical magazine Mother Earth. A fierce champion of free speech and free love, she became one of the most watched and controversial voices in Progressive-era America. In 1919, amid the Red Scare, the government deported her to the Soviet Union.
City of Troy, NY
This monument honors Emma Hart Willard, who in 1821 founded on this spot the Troy Female Seminary — the first permanent institution in America devoted to the advanced education of women. At a time when higher learning was considered unsuitable and even dangerous for girls, Willard taught mathematics, science, history, and philosophy to young women, proving they could master subjects reserved for men. Her graduates fanned out to become teachers themselves, multiplying her influence across the country. Erected in 1895 by her former pupils, the monument calls the gratitude of educated women her most enduring memorial.
City of Rochester, NY
In the heart of Rochester, the Erie Canal once crossed the Genesee River on a great stone aqueduct — a water bridge carrying boats over a river. The 1842 structure marked here replaced an earlier, smaller aqueduct from the 1820s, reflecting the canal's enormous traffic and the city's explosive growth as the nation's first inland boomtown. Powered by the river's falls and the canal's commerce, Rochester earned its nickname as the "Flour City" by milling grain shipped along this waterway. The aqueduct later carried the city's subway and today underlies Broad Street downtown.
Buffalo, NY
This memorial in Buffalo honors the men and women of Erie County, New York, who served in the United States Armed Forces. As one of the state's most populous and historically industrial counties, Erie County sent generations of residents into military service across the nation's wars, from the World Wars through later conflicts. The monument frames their sacrifice as a striving for peace and goodwill, casting wartime service as a hope for a more secure world.
Town of Wilmington, NY
High in the Adirondack Mountains near Whiteface, this peak bears the name of a teenager who climbed it for no reason other than that she wanted to. As the inscription records, fifteen-year-old Esther McComb made the first known ascent of the summit purely for the pleasure of the climb, not for survey, trade, or settlement. In an era when the northern New York wilderness was still largely untracked, a young woman reaching a remote peak simply for the joy of it was a striking thing — and the mountain has carried her name ever since.
New York, NY
Dedicated on Armistice Day — November 11 — in 1923, this flagstaff and its ever-burning star stand as a memorial to the Americans who gave their lives in World War I. Its inscription frames that sacrifice as a promise of enduring peace and a triumph for the 'Free Peoples of the World,' the hopeful language of a nation still processing the Great War's staggering losses. The eternal flame was among the era's most poignant ways to keep the memory of the war dead alive.
New York, NY
On this Manhattan spot once stood Barrett House, a hotel where the playwright Eugene O'Neill was born in 1888 to a family of touring actors. He grew up amid the theater and turned its rootless, tragic textures into a new kind of serious American drama, winning the Pulitzer Prize four times and the Nobel Prize in Literature. The plaque marks the beginning of a life that redefined the American stage.
City of Poughkeepsie, NY
This memorial honors the firefighters of Dutchess County who died in the line of duty — a tradition of civic remembrance that gathers a community to mourn and thank those who gave their lives protecting others. Line-of-duty memorials typically bear the names of the fallen and serve as gathering points for annual services.
New York, NY
Thomas "Fats" Waller, one of the defining figures of the Harlem stride piano tradition, lived in this Queens neighborhood late in his short life. A protégé of James P. Johnson and a mentor to Count Basie, Waller paired virtuoso keyboard technique with a playful, irresistible showmanship. His songs—including "Ain't Misbehavin'," "Honeysuckle Rose," and "Jitterbug Waltz"—remain jazz standards.
Town of Broadalbin, NY
For roughly 140 years this Fulton County farmstead was worked by the Fenton family, beginning when Roswell Fenton settled the land in 1790 as New York's agricultural frontier pushed north and west. His grandson, Reuben E. Fenton, rose to become a United States Senator and the Civil War–era Governor of New York. In its final decades the property operated as the 'Breadalbane Dairy' before closing around 1950.
New York, NY
Fiorello H. La Guardia—the 'Little Flower' and among the first Italian-Americans elected to Congress—spent the last years of his life here. As New York's reform mayor from 1934 to 1945 he rewrote the city charter and expanded parks, public housing, and social services, becoming one of the city's most beloved leaders.
Buffalo, NY
This monument in Buffalo honors the city's early volunteer firefighters, who manned the engines before the rise of professional, paid fire departments. In the 19th century, growing American cities like Buffalo relied entirely on citizen volunteers who answered the alarm bell to battle blazes that could level whole blocks of wooden buildings. The terse inscription "All volunteers" is a tribute to those unpaid neighbors who risked their lives to protect the community.
New York, NY
On Riverside Drive at 100th Street stands one of New York's most moving public monuments, dedicated in 1912 to the firefighters of the City of New York who gave their lives in the line of duty. Its inscription casts them as "soldiers in a war that never ends" — a war against the fires that repeatedly swept a fast-growing, densely built metropolis in the era before modern building codes and fireproof construction. The memorial, with its bronze relief of a horse-drawn engine racing to a blaze, rose during the Progressive Era, when a professionalized, uniformed fire service had become a point of civic pride and the department mourned losses at catastrophic tenement and factory fires.
City of Rensselaer, NY
On this ground in 1881, Troy Trojans first baseman Roger Connor drove a bases-loaded pitch out of reach and circled the bases for what is remembered as the first grand slam in National League history. The Trojans were one of the young league's early upstate New York clubs in the rough-and-tumble days when professional baseball was still finding its shape. Connor, a towering slugger for his era, went on to a Hall of Fame career and held the game's career home-run record for decades before Babe Ruth surpassed it.
City of Albany, NY
In 1868, Albany inventor John Wesley Hyatt was chasing a $10,000 prize offered for a substitute for increasingly scarce ivory billiard balls. His answer was celluloid — a moldable material made from nitrocellulose and camphor that is widely regarded as the first commercially successful synthetic plastic. Produced here by the Albany Billiard Ball Company, it turned a parlor-game shortage into the opening chapter of the modern plastics age.
Village of East Hampton, NY
By 1684 the English settlers of East Hampton had built a thriving farming community on the eastern tip of Long Island, and sheep were central to it — valued for wool and mutton. On this common pasture the town's earmarked flocks grazed together under the care of a hired shepherd, a shared arrangement typical of early New England and Long Island towns.
Town of Woodbury, NY
On a September day in 1851, superintendent Charles Minot was aboard a stalled New York & Erie train when he did something no railroader had done before: rather than wait blindly for an overdue oncoming train, he walked to the station telegraph and wired ahead to hold it, then ordered his own train forward on the strength of the reply. Until that moment trains ran by fixed timetable and nervous guesswork, and a single misjudgment meant a head-on collision. Minot's telegraphed order turned the humble station on the Erie line into the birthplace of the 'train order' system that would soon govern rail traffic across the continent.
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.
Village of Floral Park, NY
This memorial in the Village of Floral Park, on Long Island in Nassau County, honors local men who died in the two world wars that defined the first half of the 20th century. Communities across America raised such monuments to give permanent public form to their losses in World War I and World War II. It stands as the village's collective act of remembrance.
Town of Hamlin, NY
This ground served two very different chapters of 20th-century America. In the 1930s the Civilian Conservation Corps — a New Deal program that put unemployed young men to work on the nation's parks and forests during the Great Depression — ran Camp SP-53 here. During World War II the site was repurposed to hold enemy prisoners of war, part of a nationwide network of camps whose inmates often helped fill wartime labor shortages.
City of Rome, NY
On March 27, 1756, during the French and Indian War, a French-led force with Native allies stormed Fort Bull, a small British supply post guarding the Oneida Carrying Place — the vital portage linking the Mohawk River to Wood Creek on the water route toward Lake Ontario. The garrison was overwhelmed, its stores of powder and provisions destroyed, and many of the defenders killed.
New York, NY
This memorial honors the founder of a Staten Island institution and centers on the painting "Jesus, Friend of the Little Ones" (Isus prijatelj malenih) by Vlaho Bukovac (1855–1922). Bukovac was among the most celebrated Croatian painters of his generation, trained in Paris and admired across Europe for his portraits and religious and allegorical canvases. That one of his works came to adorn an American institution reflects the deep bonds between Croatian immigrant communities and the artistic and religious culture of their homeland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
New York, NY
In the mid-17th century, the Dutch village of Vlishing (today's Flushing, Queens) became an unlikely cradle of religious liberty in the American colonies. On June 7, 1672, George Fox, the English founder of the Society of Friends—the Quakers—preached to a gathering here beneath a stand of great oaks that later took his name. His visit strengthened a Quaker community that had already defied a ban on their worship, a stand of conscience remembered as part of Flushing's early fight for freedom of religion.
New York, NY
In the Conservatory Garden at the north end of Central Park stands a quiet bronze fountain honoring Frances Hodgson Burnett, the English-born American author whose children's books—most enduringly The Secret Garden—shaped generations of young readers. The fountain's two children, a boy playing a flute and a girl holding a bowl, echo Mary and Dickon from that beloved 1911 novel, set in a walled garden much like the one that surrounds them here. Dedicated in the 1930s after Burnett's death, the memorial was a gift meant for the children of the city, tying the author's imaginative world to a real public garden they could wander.
New York, NY
This small triangle of pavement in Queens is one of hundreds of "squares" that New York City has quietly dedicated to hometown servicemen, turning ordinary street corners into places of remembrance. It honors Frank C. Prokop and bears the name of Glenridge Post 34 of the Catholic War Veterans (C.W.V.), a national organization of Catholic servicemen founded in the 1930s that established local posts across the boroughs. Such memorial squares were typically dedicated by neighbors and veterans' groups to keep the memory of a local man's service and sacrifice alive on the streets where he once lived.
New York, NY
While living here in 1957–59, the poet, critic, and museum curator Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) wrote a monograph on the painter Jackson Pollock. His breezy, urban poems shared the spontaneous, expressionist energy of Pollock's action paintings, and he became a central voice of the New York School that fused poetry and postwar abstract art.
New York, NY
This New York City memorial honors Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945), the four-term president who steered the United States through its two greatest 20th-century trials — the Great Depression and World War II. His New Deal redefined the role of the federal government, and his wartime leadership helped guide the Allies toward victory before his death in April 1945.
New York, NY
On December 4, 1783, days after the last British troops left New York, George Washington gathered his officers in the Long Room of Fraunces Tavern to bid them an emotional farewell, the Revolutionary War won and his command soon to be surrendered. The tavern was kept by Samuel Fraunces, a man of West Indian origin who had long served the patriot cause. The scene — a victorious general voluntarily taking leave of his army — became one of the enduring images of the new nation.
New York, NY
Fred Christ Trump was born in the Queens neighborhood of Woodhaven in 1905 and, according to this marker, began building as a teenager and raised this store. From those beginnings grew the family real-estate firm E. Trump & Son, later the Trump Organization, which shaped much of the outer-borough housing landscape in the twentieth century. The plaque notes his role as father of Donald Trump.
Town of Guilderland, NY
Frederick Crounse was a local farmer who served as an officer in the 3rd Albany County Militia during the American Revolution, when the settlers of the Mohawk and Hudson valleys were pulled into one of the war's decisive campaigns. In the autumn of 1777, American forces converged on Saratoga to halt General Burgoyne's advance from Canada, and civilians and militiamen like Crounse kept the army fed and supplied through the long fight. This marker stands on his farm in Guilderland, where he was laid to rest, tying an ordinary working landscape to a battle that changed the course of the Revolution.
New York, NY
By the 1840s New York was a booming commercial city drawing waves of immigrants, and reformer Townsend Harris believed their children deserved a shot at higher learning. In 1849 his campaign bore fruit here with the opening of the Free Academy—a tuition-free public college "for the poor man's children"—which began with a class of 149. Renamed the College of the City of New York in 1866, it grew into today's Baruch College, a global name in business education.
New York, NY
For a few short years in the early 1960s, this corner of the northeast Bronx was the gateway to Freedomland USA, an enormous amusement park laid out in the shape of a map of the United States. Visitors could wander from a re-created Old New York to a Wild West frontier, riding attractions themed to the nation's history and folklore in what promoters billed as the world's largest entertainment center. The park opened in 1960 but struggled financially and closed for good in 1964, and the marshy site was soon cleared for a very different landmark — the vast Co-op City housing development that rises here today.
Buffalo, NY
Standing in Buffalo's Front Park, overlooking the Niagara River that separates the United States from Canada, this memorial celebrates one of the world's longest peaceful borders. After the War of 1812 left the two nations bruised but eventually reconciled, the long, undefended boundary became a point of pride — a frontier guarded not by fortresses but by friendship. The monument was raised in the early twentieth century to mark roughly a century of unbroken peace between the two countries.
Village of Malverne, NY
Gaddis Park honors Hamilton S. Gaddis (1891–1965), who served as mayor of the Village of Malverne from 1933 to 1941, guiding this Long Island village — served by the Long Island Rail Road — through the depths of the Great Depression. In 1971 the incorporated village dedicated the park and its flagpole in his memory. It is a hometown tribute that turned a patch of green into a small monument to civic service.
Town of Amherst, NY
This memorial in Amherst, New York, honors Mohandas Karamchand "Mahatma" Gandhi (1869–1948), the Indian independence leader who pioneered satyagraha, a philosophy of nonviolent resistance that toppled British colonial rule. Dedicated on 2 October 2020 — the 151st anniversary of his birth, observed worldwide as the International Day of Non-Violence — the marker carries one of his most famous exhortations to personal and social transformation. Gandhi statues and memorials across the United States reflect his profound influence on American reform movements.
New York, NY
In the autumn of 1776, the British had just captured New York City and turned nearby Staten Island into a major staging ground, its shores watched across the narrow tidal waters of the Arthur Kill from New Jersey. Hugh Mercer—a Scottish-born physician who became one of Washington's most trusted generals—commanded American forces in the region and pressed the kind of swift, small-scale raids that kept a larger enemy off balance. This spot marks one such strike: patriots crossing from Perth Amboy fell upon the enemy by surprise, carrying off prisoners along with captured weapons and ammunition. Mercer would be mortally wounded only months later at the Battle of Princeton, sealing his place among the Revolution's early martyrs.
City of Schenectady, NY
Schenectady earned the nickname "The City That Lights and Hauls the World" thanks to the sprawling works that grew up along the Mohawk River here. Thomas Edison relocated his machine works to Schenectady in the 1880s, and in 1892 that operation merged into the newly formed General Electric, which made the city its manufacturing and research heart. For generations GE's plants and its pioneering research laboratory drew engineers and inventors who turned electricity into everyday life, from light bulbs and turbines to X-ray tubes and early broadcasting.
New York, NY
In the spring of 1790, barely a year into his presidency and with the new federal government still finding its footing in nearby New York City, George Washington set out on a tour of Long Island, riding its country roads to see the land and meet the citizens of the young republic. This tablet marks one stretch of that journey through what is now Queens. It was placed in 1934 by the Matinecock Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, part of a nationwide effort in that era to fix the memory of the founding generation onto the everyday landscape.
Village of Geneseo, NY
James S. Wadsworth was a wealthy Genesee Valley landowner who left behind a comfortable life to serve the Union cause during the Civil War. Rising to brevet major general, he commanded troops at major battles including Gettysburg before being mortally wounded leading his men at the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864. This statue in his home village of Geneseo honors a man who championed the Union, emancipation, and his beloved valley to the very end.
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.
New York, NY
This granite obelisk at the crossing of Fifth Avenue and Broadway honors William Jenkins Worth, a soldier from Hudson, New York, whose career traced the young republic's expanding military ambitions. He earned his commission in the War of 1812, spent the 1820s shaping the officer corps as Commandant of Cadets at West Point, and won his greatest fame in the hard-fought campaigns of the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. When he died in 1849, the city he served brought him home, and the monument that rose over his grave became one of the very few burial sites in Manhattan marked by a public memorial.
New York, NY
Between 1929 and 1933, composer George Gershwin lived here with his brother and lyricist Ira Gershwin, a creative partnership that produced some of the era's most enduring Broadway music. During these years they wrote the hit Girl Crazy and the political satires Of Thee I Sing and Let 'Em Eat Cake. Of Thee I Sing became the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
New York, NY
For several years beginning in 1929, this was home to Babe Ruth at the height of his fame. "The Sultan of Swat" powered the New York Yankees to seven pennants between 1920 and 1934 and hit 714 career home runs, a record that stood until 1974. Larger than life on and off the field, Ruth became the defining star of baseball's golden age before moving on to Riverside Drive.
New York, NY
George T. Delacorte (1893–1991) built a publishing empire and then spent much of his fortune making New York City more delightful, funding fountains, monuments, and whimsical public gifts across the five boroughs. A memorial to him honors the philanthropist whose generosity, in the inscription's words, helped "beautify New York City." His gifts turned private wealth into shared public pleasure enjoyed by generations of New Yorkers.
New York, NY
On April 30, 1789, George Washington stood on the balcony of Federal Hall in lower Manhattan and took the oath as the first President of the United States. New York City served as the nation's first capital, and this moment set the young republic's experiment in self-government into motion. The stone marked here commemorates the physical spot where that history began.
Village of Patchogue, NY · est. 1999
On April 22, 1790, President George Washington dined at Hart's Tavern during his tour of Long Island, part of a series of journeys he made to see the new nation firsthand. Roadside taverns like this served as the inns, meeting halls, and waystations of early America. The marker recalls the day the first President passed through this Suffolk County community.
New York, NY
On October 18, 1776, Colonel John Glover led a small force of Patriots in a fighting delay against advancing British and Hessian troops under General William Howe in what became the Battle of Pell's Point. By slowing the enemy's flanking advance, Glover's men bought George Washington's army the time it needed to withdraw north toward White Plains and Westchester. This boulder marks the ground near where that stand was made.
Town of Huntington, NY
During World War II, the Long Island town of Huntington sent scores of its young men into uniform, and this beachside memorial gathers 127 of their names under the banner of the "Gold Star Battalion." The gold star had by then become the nation's emblem of a family that lost a loved one in service, a tradition carried forward from the First World War. Set where the community gathers by the water, the monument turns an ordinary shoreline into a place of remembrance for a generation that answered the call from a single town.
New York, NY
This monument was raised by American Legion Post 1296 to honor those who died in their nation's service. The American Legion was founded in 1919 by returning veterans of the First World War and became one of the country's most active builders of local war memorials through the twentieth century. Without naming a single conflict, the dedication reaches across every war to all who "paid the supreme sacrifice."
Village of Mill Neck, NY
This monument in Mill Neck, on Long Island's storied Gold Coast, honors Sara Appleby Hutchins, a woman for whom conservation was not a cause but a daily habit. In an era when the North Shore's estates and shorelines faced mounting development pressure, individuals like Hutchins helped safeguard the marshes, woodlands, and wildlife that made the region distinctive. The great blue heron—patient, watchful, and dependent on healthy wetlands—was chosen as a fitting emblem of that quiet stewardship.
New York, NY
In the years after 1918, neighborhoods across America raised memorials to the men who had marched off to the Great War, and Brooklyn's Greenpoint was no exception. A dense, working-class district of shipyards, glassworks, and immigrant families along the East River, Greenpoint sent its sons into the trenches of France, and this monument gathers the community's grief and pride into a single civic tribute. Its language—echoing Lincoln's vow that government 'shall not perish from the earth'—frames local sacrifice as service to the nation's founding ideals.
New York, NY
In 1965, the wooded hills of Staten Island's High Rock Park became a rallying point for one of New York City's earliest grassroots conservation fights, and Gretta Moulton stood at its center. Her campaign helped spare the land from development and seeded the far larger effort to protect the Staten Island Greenbelt, a sprawling patchwork of forest and wetland set improbably within the nation's largest city. Moulton also served as a trustee of the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences, linking the borough's cultural life to the stewardship of its landscape. This gate stands as a quiet tribute to a citizen-organizer whose work outlasted her.
Town of Martinsburg, NY
Greystone Manor is the limestone mansion built between 1803 and 1805 for General Walter Martin, the pioneering settler and namesake of Martinsburg on the early frontier of New York's Lewis County. A civic, industrial, religious, and educational leader, Martin raised his Federal-style home in the opening years of American settlement here; Greek Revival wings were added around 1835 under his sons. Over two centuries the house served as a tavern, a convalescent home for Canadian soldiers of the First World War, and a nursing home before the Lewis County Historical Society acquired it.
Town of Bedford, NY
During the Revolutionary War, the high ground of Guard Hill offered a sweeping view over the surrounding Westchester countryside — the kind of vantage point that decided the fate of armies. It was important enough to be labeled "a commanding height" on the survey maps drawn by Robert Erskine, the Scottish-born engineer who served as Surveyor-General to the Continental Army and mapped the terrain George Washington's forces fought over. Throughout the war years, American observation patrols climbed to this summit to watch for enemy movement across a region that sat perilously between the British stronghold in New York City and the Patriot lines to the north.
New York, NY
In 1925, from a Manhattan address, a sharp-tongued editor launched a weekly magazine that would help define urban American wit for a century. Harold Ross gathered a circle of writers, humorists, and performers—among them Dorothy Parker, Harpo Marx, and George Gershwin—whose crackling repartee set the tone for The New Yorker. The magazine's blend of reporting, criticism, fiction, and cartoons became a national institution.
City of Glen Cove, NY
In the early 20th century, Glen Cove was transforming from a Long Island coastal village into a Gold Coast community, and civic-minded residents shaped its public institutions. Harriet Barnes Pratt, a prominent figure known for her work in landscape design and public improvement, lent her leadership to the creation of the city's Civic Center. On May 31, 1937, the City Council dedicated this park in her honor as a lasting expression of gratitude for that service.