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The walking tour was an interesting and educational experience. While we walked, we were allowed a glimpse of the world that raised Whitman and procured some of the greatest revolutionary thinkers in American history.
We visited the Plymouth Church near where Whitman lived and where he and key figures in history like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Harriet Beecher Stowe attended mass.

The front of Plymouth Church

The Plymouth Church is a New York Landmark

Then we moved on to the Brooklyn Promenade where Abraham Lincoln himself once said “There may be finer views than this in the world, but I don’t believe it.” While the landscape is notably different than what Lincoln saw during his time in New York, the impact is the same. When you know where to look, New York can be breathtakingly beautiful.

A view from the Brooklyn Promenade.

Part of the Manhattan Skyline.

A view from the Brooklyn Promenade.

Even today, there are still water taxis.

The modern day ferry.

Even from a distance, the Brooklyn Bridge is an impressive structure- you don’t need to be close up to see all the detail and hard work that went into a bridge that decades after its construction, still stands solid.

The Brooklyn Bridge from a distance.

The Brooklyn Bridge with the Manhattan Bridge in the background.

After that we made our way over to the Eagle Warehouse, a now residential building that once housed the ‘Brooklyn Eagle’ where Whitman worked as an editor. Whitman used to look out his second floor window at Manhattan street. The street below it is still cobble-stoned.

Below Whitman's old window, the street is still cobblestoned.

Standing on the uneven stone, I couldn’t imagine how people drove carriages or even walked on the streets without falling over.

It's as bumpy as it looks.

The last stop on out tour was the Fulton pier. Or outside of if at least. The pier was closed for filming today- go figure. That aside, we read the first 4 sections of “Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry while taking in the sights and sounds of Old Fulton Street.

I didn’t just learn about Whitman today, I gained a greater appriciation for the borough I live in.

This is actually two short responses combined into one post on the reading we were assigned this week.

 Mother, Father, Water, Earth, Me:

First off, I can’t help commenting on the descriptions of the New York Whitman grew up in. 

Many of the things Whitman lived through, I can’t really relate to. ‘The Red Death’? I can’t imagine living in a world where one disease could kill 100’s of people a day without a cure in sight. The book describes farms and open fields- the last things to come to my mind when thinking about New York City. The only streams I see are torrents of water going down the gutter on rainy days and all the horse stables have either been demolished or converted into modern looking apartment buildings.  Not to say there’s nothing of the New York he grew up in left- the ferry ride from Long Island is more or less the same, and Brooklyn can still easily be seen as the ‘City of Churches’. You can’t go more than 15 blocks in any given direction without seeing one.

The Shadow and the Light of a Young Man’s Soul

My generation is used to keyboards and tiny entry pads, not selecting characters out of boxes to be laid on printers. Reading about typesetting reminds me of the things I take for granted like printing out directions on a map or a last minute homework assignment…They’re  all things I do in under 30 seconds when the job Whitman did had to take at least 10 minutes, probably more.

I watched a documentary on Walt Whitman yesterday and I couldn’t help needing to comment on the last few years of his life. Whitman is probably the most determined writer I’ve ever read about. He spent the majority of his life writing and revising ‘Leaves of Grass’ and dealt with society’s reaction to revolutionary thinking in a way that many of us can only dream of. He thrived on criticism, took great pleasure in ruffling the feathers of high society and bragged about things others would sooner die than admit. Put bluntly he was a real person who rarely put up a façade for anyone. He ran himself ragged seeing to soldiers during the civil war, sitting to talk to them and comfort them when no one else would. He was a thinker, a leader and full of life, yet his last few years had more pain and suffering in them than most see in a lifetime. The man who would hop on the ferry and bus to roam around Manhattan was wheelchair bound and almost completely paralyzed. The country he’d aspired to unite through poetry could barely come together even after the death of their president. The light in his eye that had been present through much of his life was gone. After learning more about his life, the line “If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles” takes on new meaning. To me it sounds resigned as if he’s realized that his words cannot reach the people of his time and that they’re too stubborn for change. It made me sad to think that through all his hard work Whitman died without a wife or child-alone.

Suffering through hardships, fighting tooth and nail to lay down your opinion- to chip it into the stone of history so that it may be appreciated not for the society of your time, but for all the generations that may come later. That is the true fate of a great writer.

What makes the Brooklyn Bridge so special (to me at least) is that it never changes- no matter how far back in time you look it stands a solid fixture in New Yorks rich history.

There were many contributing factors to the Great Fire of 1835. The city’s water supply had been depleted by small fires over the summer, the city was over crowded, the wind stoked the flames while keeping the water away, and subzero temperatures froze hydrants and hoses making it impossible to fight the flames. The flames could be seen states away and firefighters from Brooklyn and Philadelphia were brought in in an attempt to fight the flames. The fire did around 20 Million Dollars worth of Damage to New York City and destroyed nearly 700 buildings, including the ‘fire proof’ Merchant Exchange. The fire also did major damage to printing and publishing district. Only two out of New York’s six morning newspapers survived the fire, leaving many writers and compositors without work. My focus however isn’t on how much damage the fire did, but why it leveled a portion of the city.
To start, fire trucks back then weren’t what we’re all used to now. Where we have large gleaming red trucks, they had horse drawn carriages and buckets.

They didn’t have air tanks or fire repellant gear and technology to pump water from engine to hose had just been invented. Fire hydrants weren’t readily available like they are today and there was often a distance between a water source and the fire. There was also the issue of how many firefighters were on the job. At the time of the fire, there were only about 1,200 firefighters in a city in the middle of an economic boom. Though this is just my opinion, I think that the fire wouldn’t have been as devistating if the city hadn’t been overcrowded.