From Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker” that paints a portrait of New York from another time:

If Fort Clinton was heroism, Castle Garden was the glory heroism earned.

It was at Castle Garden that on August 16, 1824 that, in the words of one historian, ‘it was proved that Republics are not always ungrateful.’ For it was at Castle Garden on that date that Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette (who as a rich young nobleman had defied his king and fought for America) returned to it 67 years old and penniless.

‘Many of the spectators doubtless had in mind a galant, boyish figure in the buff and blue of the American Revolution, with powdered hair tied in a cue,’ the historian wrote.

What they saw was an old civilian in a short-haired brown wig. But when the old civilian stepped onto the Castle Garden landing stage, after a trip up the harbor on which the ship was escorted on a huge flotilla to begin a visit on which he was to receive from the government and citizens of the United States gifts of bonds and land worth almost half a million dollars, the Castle’s cannon roared out a hundred times.

When the old man walked slowly into Battery Park to the incessant huzzahs of the multitude that packed the waterfront, he walked between the weeping ranks of the Lafayette guards. When he rode up Broadway, men and women on rooftops threw flowers in his path. A month later a tall spar was raised in the center of the Fort, a vast awning of sail cloth was spread across its entire ceiling, the white banner of France was entwined with the Stars and Stripes, trophies of arms glittered from the walls, and when Lafayette appeared at the ball, the gay sets dissolved and the dancers formed a long lane, and as the old man walked along it he saw that each man and woman was wearing a medallion bearing his likeness, the women’s entwined with roses.

And it was at Castle Clinton that, ten years later, the handful of Lafayette guards still alive drew up in a hollow square in the center of which was a riderless black horse, spurred boots reversed slung across its empty saddle, to hear the funeral oration for their dead hero.

Lafayette visited every one of America’s 24 states on this visit. I wish Philadelphia would name something prominent in his honor.