about the author
Russell Granger is a branding and marketing executive specializing in digital design and interactive media. He began focusing his research and archiving efforts on antebellum Brooklyn when family history pursuits led to the discovery of an association with Walt Whitman. Russell currently lives in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, just a few streets from several ancestral addresses from the 1830s.INTRODUCTION
If Walt Whitman’s association with Brooklyn is not exactly overlooked by scholars and biographers, then neither is it explicitly emphasized. The fact of Whitman’s residency – he lived in Brooklyn for over half his life, and twice as long as he lived anywhere else – might not be so meaningful if his poetry wasn’t so saturated with the physical world.
Whitman may have celebrated the body, but his environment supplied a multitude of muscular symbols that one is hard-pressed to imagine having arisen from anywhere other than the explosion of progress along the East River in New York in the mid-nineteenth century. If one of the miracles of Whitman’s poetry is how successfully it transcends time, one of its wonders is how richly it evokes place.
Our journey here is entitled Whitman’s Brooklyn, not Brooklyn’s Whitman. Brooklyn holds no exclusive claim to Whitman. He belongs to America; he belongs the world. Perhaps the rationale for minimizing Whitman’s local association in mainstream scholarship is to emphasize the larger context, the emblematic nature of his connection with not only America but with humanity itself. Highlighting Whitman’s environment is not to suggest that he was any less America’s poet for the influences of his locale, but rather to suggest that Brooklyn was America — at least, at any rate, the America Whitman envisioned.
The 1850s were arguably the pinnacle of Brooklyn’s rise as a great American city, with a uniquely modern mix of cultural diversity, industrial might, and progressive thought. Henry Ward Beecher had recently established his immensely influential pulpit at Plymouth Church; diverse ethnic communities were living side-by-side with greater ease than anywhere else in the country, and the rate of sheer physical progress outpaced any other city in the nation.
One of the challenges in curating a visual impression of antebellum Brooklyn is not as much due to the relative scarcity of images as to the evolutionary nature of the city itself. Brooklyn in 1850 was an entirely 
different place than it was just twenty years prior. Incorporated as a city in 1834, what was little more than a port village became an indefatigable boom town within a decade. It took less than two decades for Brooklyn to become a true metropolis, and by the mid-1850’s it was the third largest city in America.
The sheer physicality of this remarkable expansion is rarely contemplated as a foundational influence on Leaves of Grass, the first edition of which was published in 1855. But the material expression of the period’s unbridled optimism, the brute symbolism of American enterprise – economic, social, and spiritual – could not have failed to have an impact on the poet, especially considering the potent physical metaphors in the work itself.
Great is liberty! Great is equality! I am their follower,
Helmsmen of nations, choose your craft . . . . where you sail I sail,
Yours is the muscle of life or death . . . . yours is the perfect science . . . . in you I
have absolute faith.Great is today, and beautiful,
It is good to live in this age . . . . there never was any better.Great are the plunges and throes and triumphs and falls of democracy,
Great the reformers with their lapses and screams,
Great the daring and venture of sailors on new explorations.
The palpable momentum built by the architecture of Whitman’s words is what contributed in large measure to his eventual place as the first true American poet. No drawing-room reverie this, no diaphanous declarations these. Whitman’s words were as large as the pillars on Brooklyn City Hall, as heady as the Heights when the acres of peach trees blossomed; as powerful as the mechanics and masons who labored each day over two tumultuous decades of insatiable progress.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Whitman’s Brooklyn would not have been possible without the sponsorship and generous support of The Walt Whitman Project and its indefatigable founder and champion, Greg Trupiano. Grateful acknowledgment also goes to Erik Fortmeyer, Brooklyn historian and tireless scribe, whose research has been pivotal for the project. Also in our debt is Brian Merlis, the most relentless collector of Brooklyn photographs the world has ever known; Daniella Romano, Archivist at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the most prodigiously charming historian the city has ever seen; Lisa DeBoer at the Brooklyn Public Library, Ruth Janson of the Brooklyn Museum, and Lon Black of the the Walt Whitman Project.
