Pudding Rock, 1883. According to the NYPL description of this image... A truly immense glacial boulder, rising 25 feet in the air, and being 30 feet in diameter. On one side was a natural fire-place, where the Indians used to enjoy their corn feasts and oyster banquets. Under its cool shade, the Huguenots rested on their long Sabbath Day journeys from New Rochelle down to the old French Protestant Church in lower New York. After serving as a natural landmark to early settlers and to travelers in stage coaches en route from New York to Boston, it has finally been blasted into countless fragments so as no longer to "obstruct the march of civilization." Supposedly the local English farmers thought the massive rock looked like great big Christmas plum pudding, and so they named it the Pudding Rock.

While New York City is certainly best known for its towering skyscrapers and classy historic districts, its earliest monuments of stone are just that: stone. The geologic landscape of the city was formed between 20,000 and 18,000 years ago with the movement of the Wisconsin Ice Sheet down from Canada. The rock and debris deposited from the ice sheet, as well as the valleys it deepened, bedrock it smoothed and glacial grooves it left, formed the landscape of the city that began to grow in the colonial era. In some cases the rocks have been moved or crumbled in the name of urban development. But some of this geologic history can still be seen within the urban environment. This collection highlights some of the more well-known geologic features.