The figures represent various periods from Schenectady's history. The first is the Hough Building, a four-story structure at the corner of Broadway and State Street. It was named for Isaac Hough, who used it as a furniture store in the late nineteenth century and added a hotel by 1914. It was used before and after Hough for many other businesses including groceries, shoes, jewelers, a billiards room and the office of the Evening Star newspaper.

Next is the statue at the junction of Front, Green and North Ferry Streets which marks the northeastern edge of the Queen's Fort, built after the Schenectady Massacre of 1690. It is commonly known as Lawrence the Indian, after the Christian Mohawk who was a friend of the residents of Schenectady and one of the most persistent trackers of the French and Indians who perpetrated the raid.

The church in the next figure is the First Reformed Church of Schenectady, also known as the Dutch Reformed Church. Its first building was erected by the first settlers before 1680; the current and fourth, an architectural landmark designed by the highly regarded Victorian-Gothic architect Edward Tuckerman Potter, was restored after a disastrous 1948 fire. The First Reformed Church hosted George Washington during the revolution, and claims Schenectady's Socialist mayor George Lunn as one of its pastors. During World War II, First Reformed minister Clark V. Poling sacrificed his life during the sinking of the troop transport Dorchester. He was one of the "Four Chaplains" who gave up their life jackets so soldiers would survive.

The dome of Union College's Nott Memorial may be Schenectady's most recognizable landmark. It is the centerpiece of the first architecturally-planned campus in America, and historian David McCullough has said, "There's nothing like it anywhere else in the world." The sixteen-sided High Victorian Gothic building was begun in the 1850s by architect Edward Tuckerman Potter; it is 89 feet in diameter and 100 feet high.

The far right figure is the main General Electric building. Thomas Edison moved his electrical machine works out of New York City to Schenectady in the 1880s, and by 1892 it had become the General Electric Co. During its peak years, the plant employed 22,000 people. Many pioneering achievements in radio and television occurred in Schenectady because of the presence of GE, and it was part of the reason that Schenectady became known as "the city that lights and hauls the world."

The two figures in the foreground of the mural show a bateau (eighteenth-century flat-bottomed boat) on the Mohawk River and the Great Western Gateway Bridge running over the river. The bridge takes its name from the great natural highway to the west formed by the Mohawk Valley, and these figures highlight the importance of water transportation in Schenectady's history.