Grant’s Tomb was designed by John Duncan and completed in 1897. It houses the remains of President Ulysses S. Grant – the only United States President for whom New York City serves as final resting place. It is probably shown here from the south and west, close to the bank of the river; this vantage situates the spectator at the foot of the hill on which the Tomb rests, thereby exaggerating its actual rise.

The prose sketch in chapter twenty-one helps to explain the drawing’s hyperbole. The New Yorkers who pass by the Tomb are understood to do so with only token reverence for the past. They see the Tomb as an object of mere "historical interest," a phrase which recalls the rhetoric of tourists’ guidebooks for Manhattan site seeing. They cannot experience through the monument a sense of sorrow over the tremendous sacrifices which Grant had come to represent. The Civil War, and the brutality which it forced on daily life, were foisted upon New York more than upon any other major northern city. The Draft Riots of July, 1863 were in 1921 still not forgotten history, remembered as lived experience by the oldest city residents. The War, and the many other acts of violence suffered in the 1860s, were believed by many in 1921 to have allowed the United States to endure, and by 1921 to prosper, as a single nation. "Grant’s Tomb" continues the discussion of nationality begun in "Hell Gate Bridge," therefor, by situating national identity within the vexed narrative of progress-through-loss which the Tomb signified in a twentieth century context.