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8/4/2019 Literary Brooklyn; The Writers of Brooklyn and the Story of American City Life

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Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so

I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one ofa crowd.

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, W W

W ,

already lived out the first act o his lie. Te son o a ailing carpen-

ter, he had been a grammar school dropout; an offi ce boy or a law

firm; an apprentice to various printers; and, disastrously, a school-

teacher. Eventually he ound a calling in journalism, moving upstairs

rom the printing room to the editorial offi ce. And at the age o

twenty-six, in 1846, he was named the editor o booming Brook-

lyns leading newspaper, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, where his offi ce

window looked out on the oot o Fulton Street, by the glinting,

well-traveled East River and the Fulton Ferry. He became a promi-nent and eccentric man about town. o entertain people he would

shout out lines rom Shakespeare and Homer rom a stagecoach or

1.

Te Grandfather of Literary Brooklyn


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at the seashore, and he would hum arias as he walked down the

street. He was talked about. He was known.

Ten, in 1848, he was fired rom the Eagleafer clashing with

his boss over politics. His next newspaper jobs were short-lived, and

he began to slip out o view. He took on the look o a social dropout,

with shaggy hair, a gray beard, and overalls. In the ensuing hal

decade he was a sometime reelance journalist, a sometime book-

seller at a store he operated out o his house on a lot hed bought or

a hundred dollars, and a sometime carpenter. And sometimes he

was plain unemployed. Tere was a great boom in Brooklyn in the

early fifies, and he had his chance then, his brother George later

said, but you know he made nothing o that chance. Strange and a

bit rough around the edges, Whitman didnt make it easy or others

to reach out to him. Tings were not looking good.

But something powerul was taking hold o him rom within:

I ound mysel remaining possessd, at the age o thirty-one to

thirty-two, with a special desire and conviction . . . that had been

itting through my previous lie, or hovering on the anks, [that]

finally dominated everything else. He began composing a series o

very long, unstructured poems, o a kind not yet seen by the world.

Each day, he took them into the Rome Brothers print shop at the

corner o Cranberry Street and Fulton Street, where he and the

owners set them into type during off-hours. He would sleep late,

write more, return to the print shop. It was the nineteenth-century

equivalent o sel-publishing out o a Kinkos. And the result was

Leaves of Grass. No other book in the history o American letters,

Malcolm Cowley has written, was so completely an individual or

do-it-yoursel project.

Where Leaves of Grasscame rom no one will know. But as

Whitman said, his masterpiece drew breath rom the people o

Brooklyn, his literal and spiritual home. Walt Whitman, as much

as he was one o a crowd, was Americas first great bard and thekeystone o Brooklyns literary tradition.

It requires a considerable eat o imagination today to picture

Brooklyn as it was when Whitman first arrived as a child o three,


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in 1823. It was a place so different rom the huge urban mass o

today, with its population o 2.5 million, that it is scarcely possible

to hold it in the minds eye. Ten a separate entity rom the city o

New York, which was restricted to the island o Manhattan, Brook-

lyn was a placid little town o low-slung houses topped with billow-

ing chimney smoke, tucked in close to the shore o the East River;

the surrounding area later incorporated into Brooklyn consisted o

large arms o rolling hills and a handul o even smaller hamlets.

What is now the borough o Brooklyn boasted about as many resi-

dents as todays Wasilla, Alaska.

Across the water, Manhattan was beginning to become a cen-

tral place in American commerce and in the American imagina-

tion, but its tallest building was only our stories high. You could

stand in Brooklyn Heights and see clear across Manhattan and the

Hudson and well into New Jersey. From that spot you could watch a

great crowd o high-masted ships carrying goods up and down the

East River and especially the Hudson.

In Brooklyn in 1823 there was no regular police orce, no public

transportation, and ickering gas lamps were just being introduced

to help light the eerily quiet, unpopulated nighttime streets. Fami-

lies had to gather round the fireplace to cook or stay warm. Some

had horses and a carriage, but they contended with rutted, narrow

dirt roads, and there was no organized stagecoach service. Resi-

dents kept pigs and chickens that roamed in the streets in daytime,

rooting through the garbage alongside open sewers. Water was

drawn rom street wells and carried home. averns and stables

stood among houses and shanties. Te odors were rank. o the east

o the villageon land now densely packed with multistory apart-

ment buildingswere sprawling green fields still owned mostly by

the Dutch. Tey kept a firm hold on their properties, assured o a

market or their produce and livestock in the village o Brooklyn

and in Manhattan.Many slaves worked the land and tended to houses. In 1800,

beore slaveholding was abolished in New York State, in 1827, about

60 percent o the white households within Brooklyns current borders


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owned at least one slave, the highest proportion in the North. Te

nationwide battle over slavery would shadow Whitmans lie as it

grew to be the oremost threat to the country.

But America was a young nation in Whitmans childhood,

and the Civil War was still ar off. Whitmans ather, also named

Walter, was born the same year as the ederal government, in 1789.

Whitmans great-uncle ought and died in the Revolutionary Wars

first major battle, the Battle o Brooklyn, in 1776. Tat rout by the

English cost twelve hundred American lives in a matter o hours,

with at least another fifeen hundred wounded, captured, or miss-

ing. With deeat clearly at hand, George Washington, standing

where Court Street now crosses Atlantic Avenue, is said to have

cried, Good God! What brave ellows I must this day lose! But

acts o valor on the American side would live onparticularly in

the story o the Maryland orces who sacrificed themselves almost

to a one in challenging and delaying the much larger British con-

tingent at the Old Stone House, near todays Fourth Avenue and

Ninth Street in Brooklyn. Tat stand allowed Washington and his

men to make an overnight escape across the East River to Manhat-

tan, whispering to one another in the og to avoid alerting the Brit-

ish. I it werent or this getaway, the war could easily have ended in a

brutally swif British victory. According to the historian Kenneth

Jackson, one observer later said, Te Declaration o Independence

that was signed in ink in Philadelphia was signed in blood in Brook-

lyn. Both the heroism and the tragedy o the Battle o Brooklyn and

its afermath would become a touchstone o Whitmans work.

Between 1790 and 1810, Brooklyns population nearly tripled,

as Irish, Yankee, and Manhattanite new arrivals crowded out the

Dutch. Te Brooklyn Navy Yard gave rise to other shipyards and

maritime trades, providing work or carpenters and crafsmen.

Wooden market stalls stood by the water, and small manuacture

spread out rom the river. Whitmans ather moved to Brooklyn tobe a carpenter and builder, in the hopes o capitalizing on the

towns population boom. Although the boom continued, he didnt

succeed, perhaps because he avored old ways o building and


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because he lacked the gif or sel-promotion, though his son would

soon possess it in spades. Te Whitmans moved at least ten times

in the space o a decade.* Walt attended Brooklyns single elemen-

tary school, District School No. 1, which had been established in

1816 on Concord and Adams Streets, or about five years. Tat

would remain the only ormal education or the man about whom

the venerated critic Harold Bloom has written, No comparable

figure in the arts has emerged rom the last our centuries in the

Americas. Beore Whitman, American literature was largely or

Harvard men, like Emerson, Toreau, and Henry James. It called

to mind men o leisure, with crisp white collars and hired help.

Ten Whitman barged in.

Walts amilys finances orced him to leave school at age eleven

and go to work, and or the decades to ollow he would have the kind

o extraordinarily varied and checkered work history shared by

many writers since. In his childhood and adolescence, Brooklyn

offered very little in the way o literary and cultural lie. Few resi-

dents wanted to give money or a proposed Apprentices Library in

1824, so library representatives took a wheelbarrow door to door to

collect cast-off pamphlets and books. Te literacy rate was low and

the media hadnt extended a very meaningul reach into Brooklyn,

or indeed much o the nation. Te stodgy and relatively expensive

political newspapers had not yet met with the competition o the

mass-oriented penny press, whose pioneers were the New York Sun

(ounded in 1833) and the New York Herald(1835).

Soon Whitman would enter the burgeoning journalism trade,

beginning his apprenticeship in the laborious work o typesetting

and printing at the Brooklyn-based Long Island Patriot.He bounced

rom publications o one political stripe or another in Brooklyn,

* Teir known addresses at this time were on Front Street, Cranberry Street, Henry

Street, Johnson Street, Adams Street, illary Street, and Liberty Street (no longer in

existence). In later years Whitman lived on Prince Street, on Myrtle Avenue, on

Cumberland Street, at 99 Ryerson Street (the only one o his homes that still stands),

on Classon Avenue, and on Portland Avenue, on the site o todays Walt Whitman

Houses, a public housing project.


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Manhattan, and Long Island, picking up writing and editing skills

along with the craf o printing. In the 1830s, as New York slid

toward a depression, the newspaper business ran into trouble, and

Whitman ed to Long Island and became (at about seventeen) a

schoolteacher. An itinerant and miserably unhappy five years ol-

lowed. O, damnation, damnation! he wrote, thy other name is

school-teaching. He also attempted, with little success, to publish

his own Long Island paper, but he moved to Manhattan in 1841

and joined its revived journalism industry. ired o living in one

Manhattan boardinghouse afer another or short stintsa pattern

that many writers in their early twenties would ollowhe moved

back to Brooklyn in 1845.

Tat was Whitmans last time living in Manhattan. He always

took to Brooklyn more heartily. A great deal o his learning and

cultural exposure came rom Manhattan, but he saw it as an over-

crowded place and the center o the kind o commerce he consid-

ered vulgar. In Brooklynania, a series o articles he published in

his orties, his lasting pride in his hometown is evident. Brooklyns

situation or grandeur, beauty and salubrity is unsurpassed prob-

ably on the whole surace o the globe, he wrote, and its destiny is

to be among the most amed and choice o the hal dozen o the

leading cities o the world. He would remain in Brooklyn or the

next seventeen years, his longest stay in one place and the period

when he came into his own.

He drew energy rom Brooklyn, absorbing, as he said later, the

immense and moving power o everyday lives. Striking a chord

that echoes down through the last century and a hal o Brooklyn

literature, he relished Brooklyns position at an arms length rom

the mass o humanity and the incessant rattle o business in Man-

hattan. Near the end o those seventeen years, he wrote o Brook-

lyn with evident pride, It may not generally be known that our city

is getting to have quite a worldwide reputation. He added: Withmuch greater attractions than our neighboring island o New York,

Brooklyn is steadily drawing hither the best portion o the busi-

ness population o the great adjacent metropolis, who find here a


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superior place or dwelling. Indeed, since beore Whitmans birth

wealthy businessmen and merchants had begun building fine

homes in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, which overlooked

the East River and offered a short commute on the erry to their

jobs in lower Manhattan. Whitman put his finger, then, on a trend

that would drive Brooklyns history: many people reliant in their

proessional lives on Manhattan would find Brooklyn a more

pleasing place to live.

But it wasnt the home-owning class that most interested Whit-

man. He identified more, as writers tend to do, with those who had

something o the countercultural in themthose who were, in a

avorite word o his, agitators. In his mind he was always allied

with the common and even lowly man, the one who was spurned

by others. He would sometimes be coy about the extent o his read-

ing because he didnt want to be associated with the snobbery he

saw among the learned. Such views can be traced back to his ather,

who believed in resisting much, obeying little, in the words o

Whitman biographer Justin Kaplan. He trained his sons as radical

Democrats, on the side o the armer, the laborer, the small trades-

man, and the people. Te poet and aesthete James Russell Lowell

once warned a oreigner against paying a visit to Whitman afer he

had become amous. Lowell pegged him as a rowdy, a New York

tough, a loaer, a requenter o low places, a riend o cab drivers!

Whitman would have liked the description.

~

Te changes that have occurred in Brooklyn in the last orty years

are truly momentous, but they cannot compare to those o Whit-

mans first decades, the era that preceded and inuenced the early

editions o Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn evolved rom a quiet village

o about five thousand at Whitmans arrival to the third-largest

city in the nation by the time o the Civil War, when Whitman wasin his mid-orties. In his twenties alone the population tripled. Part

o what spurred the growth was Brooklyns investment in an indus-

trial waterront that competed with Manhattans. In the 1830s,


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Williamsburgh, then a separate town rom Brooklyn (and spelled

with an h), built large wharves along the East River and, much to

New Yorks dismay, a new erry line to Manhattan, which trans-

ported commuters both ways. By the 1850s the waterside actory

district stretched rom Greenpoint and Williamsburgh in the

north, down past the Navy Yard, and on to the southern edge o

South Brooklyn, where the Atlantic Basin, a new orty-acre ship-

ping terminal in todays Red Hook, drew much Erie Canal traffi c

away rom Manhattan. Along this corridor, iron oundries our-

ished, as did breweries, distilleries, sugar refineries, and drug com-

panies (Pfizer started up in Williamsburgh in 1849).

Tese developments did little to glamorize Brooklyn or increase

its prestige. Te tourists were still over the river, promenading on

Broadway. Brooklyn was becoming a boiler room belowdecks o

the regions economic ship. And who was stoking the boiler? Immi-

grants, in large part. Williamsburgh was turning into a version o

Manhattans Kleindeutschland: by 1847 it was two-thirds German.

Irish and British were also arriving in massive numbers, bringing

the oreign-born proportion o the population to roughly hal in

1855. Joining the immigrant working class, though, were mem-

bers o the middle classyoung proessionals, clerks, and shop

ownerswho migrated rom Manhattan while holding on to their

jobs there. Te place o choice or the most affl uent remained Brook-

lyn Heights. Others spread southward into the more affordable area

that incorporated todays Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, and Carroll

Gardens. Te rontier neighborhoods to the east, land o bargains,

were Fort Greene and East New York.

As Brooklyn rapidly urbanized and became more commer-

cially active, it also gained something o a cultural oothold

developments that dont necessarily go hand in hand in the growth

o cities. Whitman had no true local literary equals, but around him

there emerged an intellectual erment, and in particular a multi-plicity o voices that swam against the current o mainstream soci-

ety. He beriended activists in the womens rights movement, wrote

in the papers in defiance o economic injustice to women, and


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embraced women as equals in poetry. Striking a note that was

characteristically both inclusive and controversial, he wrote, I am

the poet o woman the same as man, / And I say it is as great to

be a woman as to be a man. Although he was not a Quakerhe

attended many churches, but never a single one or very long

Whitman venerated the iconoclastic Quaker leader Elias Hicks,

whose radically democratic version o the aith, denying any special

sanctity o Christ, had gained ascendancy quickly in Whitmans

childhood. Whitman lived in an age when orators achieved wide-

spread popularity and whipped up a great stirnowhere more so

than in Brooklyn, where a more accessible pulpit style took root.

At one point he wrote regular columns reviewing local sermons

and speeches. Whitman didnt align himsel with any religion or

political perspective but gave due attention and credit to the art

o speaking outthe American religion, you might say, in his

eyes.

Te most amous local orator was Henry Ward Beecher, who

packed the house beginning in 1847 at the Plymouth Church, still

active today, on the corner o Hicks and Orange Streets in Brook-

lyn Heights. So many Manhattanites came to see him that on Sun-

days the Fulton Ferry came to be called Beechers Ferry. With his

inormal manner, his rousing voice, and his defiance o the norms

o religion, Beecher offered a combination, it was said, o Saint Paul

and P. . Barnum. Not surprisingly, he became Whitmans avorite

Brooklyn minister. Beechers sister was Harriet Beecher Stowe,

whose 1852 novel Uncle oms Cabin energized the abolitionist

movement. Afer early objections to reeing existing slaves, Henry

Ward Beecher, or his part, turned Plymouth Church into a center

o antislavery activity and held auctions where church members

bought the reedom o particular slaves. Brooklyn became a vibrant

center o abolitionism, and Beecher grew to be a national and even

international figure. Fierce division over this most undamentalissue o the day marked the whole period o Whitmans intellectual

coming-o-age, a tumultuous era in national politics.

Te newspaper business held a place in the thick o it all.


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Where Whitman himsel stood on slavery would be made clearest

when he served as editor o the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, his most

prominent journalistic position. Although he was still in his twen-

ties when he was hired as the editor, he had become a man o con-

siderable experience in journalism and seemed a natural or the

position. He had been trained and, more to the point, had trained

himsel or the role. In Walt Whitman: Song of Himself, Jerome

Loving writes, I a whaling ship was Melvilles Harvard and Yale,

Brooklyn and newspaper work were this poets university. Te

Eaglewas the leading paper o Brooklyn, and Whitman possessed

not only a deep amiliarity with the lie o the city and its surround-

ings but a ormidable grasp o the national scene. In Brooklyn, the

political orces shaping the nation were intensified and writ large,

and he appeared more than happy to play a central role. Te paper

was steeped in a sense o Brooklyn pride that pitted itsel against

Manhattan, a pride that exists to this day, and it was a fitting place

or Whitman to give unbridled voice to his populist views.

Although he adopted neither extreme in the debate over eman-

cipation, he was anything but indifferent. An undeniable strain

o racism ran through his thinking, yet he objected to slavery. He

amously wrote, in the preace to Leaves of Grass, Te attitude o

great poets is to cheer up slaves and horriy despots. But his main

preoccupation was not the slaves themselves but the danger o the

nationwide crisis over their ate. In the Eaglehe came out firmly in

support o the Wilmot Proviso, which proposed a ban on slaverys

expansion into the new territories o the West, in a dispute then on

everyones lips. He wrote, We must plant ourselves rmly on the side

of freedom, and openly espouse it. Te owner o the Eagle, Isaac

Van Anden, ell into line when Democratic leaders dropped their

support or the proviso. Whitman, never one to back down and

always a proud heretic, wrote an editorial in defiance o his bosss

views, and weeks later he was out o a job.


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