“Those who stand for nothing fall for everything.” — Alexander Hamilton

An interesting, if slightly morbid twist on travel is to visit the graves of famous people who died young, and combine it with a visit to the place where they met their demise. Some places, like Normandy, with the D-Day beaches and cemeteries, are obvious opportunities to combine the two. Other opportunities sneak up on you through serendipity.

A visit to Metro New York afforded such an opportunity. Walking past Trinity Church on the way to Ground Zero and the 9/11 Memorial, we realized the opportunity to pay our respects to Alexander Hamilton at his gravesite in the graveyard adjacent to the church. As with most graveyards, we walk in history along ground that has largely remained the same since the interred last saw daylight. In Lower Manhattan, with modern skyscrapers all around you, the opportunity to walk amongst 400 years of untouched history is sobering.

The next day, we took the ferry from Manhattan over to Weehawken, New Jersey to the place where Aaron Burr shot him in the most famous duel in American history. To see the rock where Hamilton bled out on encaged at the top reminded me a bit of Plymouth Rock. Who knows if it’s really the rock or not? But it offered an opportunity to see roughly where he died, which was about 20 feet above the Hudson River.

It turned out all that climbing wasn’t necessary to actually see the Weehawken Dueling Grounds, but those grounds are either train tracks or otherwise paved over at this point. No matter, the views from the Hamilton Memorial were absolutely worth the climb up the stairs to the top of the cliff. It turned out to be a fine way to say farewell to New York and its famous resident too.