It stands west of the southbound lanes of Riverside Drive north of 122nd Street in Morningside Heights, Manhattan.

The monument, originally erected by George Pollock, who was either the boy's father or his uncle, has been replaced twice due to deterioration.

[1] During Morningside Heights’s Golden Age, when the nearby Claremont Inn served luminaries that included George M. Cohan, Cole Porter, Lillian Russell and Mayor Jimmy Walker, the site inspired pilgrimages and poetry.

Of the many verses written about the memorial is Herman George Scheffauer’s “An Amiable Child,” which describes the grave as being “like a song of peace in iron frays.”[1] An identically named poem by Anna Markham, wife of proletarian author and critic Edwin Markham, opens with the lines that defined the monument for her contemporaries: “At Riverside, on the slow hill-slant / Two memoried graves are seen / A granite dome is over Grant / and over a child the green.”[1] The monument is also the inspiration for Irene Marcuse's novel Death of an Amiable Child.

By one late nineteenth-century account, as related by Donald Reynolds, an attempt to relocate the grave in order to clear space for General Grant's tomb, which was quickly abandoned by the city after a groundswell of public opposition, transformed the “tribute to the gentleness that underlies the apparent brutality of the great city” into “almost a national institution”.