  Art in the Parks - NYC Department of Parks and Recreation

This ancient cannon was exhumed in 1892 on the site of No. 55 Broadway on the corner of Exchange Alley or the highway leading to the fortification called Oyster Pasty 1695-1783 Presented to the City of New York by William Henry Mairs Placed here by the Children of the City History Club 1914

The pond was a large, sixty-foot deep pool fed by an underground spring. The waters derived their name from seventeenth century Dutch settlers, who called it &amp;ldquo;kolch&amp;rdquo; meaning &amp;ldquo;small body of water&amp;rdquo;.&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Following the English capture of New Amsterdam (1664), the name was corrupted to &amp;ldquo;collect.&amp;rdquo;&amp;nbsp;  

By 1811, the City had completed the filling of Collect Pond. A neighborhood known as Paradise Square soon arose over the pond&amp;rsquo;s previous site. Unfortunately, due to the area&amp;rsquo;s extremely high water table, Paradise Square began to sink in the 1820&amp;rsquo;s. The neighborhood also began to emit a foul odor, prompting the most affluent residents to leave the community. By the 1830s, Paradise Square had become the notorious &amp;ldquo;Five Points,&amp;rdquo; an extremely poor and dangerous neighborhood renowned for its crime and filth.  

During this time, the pond was still clean enough to use for the area&amp;rsquo;s drinking water. By the early nineteenth century, however, New York City had transformed the sparkling waters into a communal open sewer. Disgusted, local authorities initiated a project to fill the sewer with earth from an adjacent hill.&amp;nbsp; 

 Author of the New Colossus, the sonnet inscribed on the Statue of Liberty the New Colossus. Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to land. Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of exiles, from her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she with silent lips, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"&amp;nbsp; Presented by the Federation of Jewish Women's Organizations, inc. the occasion of the American Jewish tercentenary this foundation stone is the gift of the state of Israel&amp;nbsp;  

However, Levy challenged Stuyvesant on such issues as citizenship, the right to bear arms, and property ownership  

Erected by the State of New York to honor the memory of the twenty three men women &amp; children who landed in September 1654 and founded the first Jewish community in North AmericaAmerican Jewish Tercentenary&nbsp;1654-1954 Art in the Parks - NYC Department of Parks and Recreation

 And hanged for treason the next morning on a gallows believed to have been erected near 63rd Street and First Avenue.  

The sculpture collection in New York City's Parks constitutes the greatest outdoor public art museum in the United States. A veritable “Who's who” of American art, it includes the work of nineteenth-century masters such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French and John Quincy Adams Ward, as well as contemporary subjects and conceptions by the likes of Louise Nevelson, George Segal, Alice Aycock and Robert Graham. More than 1,000 monuments, 300 of which are sculptures, grace our most prominent civic spaces as well as the many localities which constitute the greater metropolis. Ranging in size from commemorative tablets to triumphal arches, they honor people and events that helped shape our city, nation, and the international community. It is this cultural and aesthetic legacy that we wish to preserve.