Walt Whitman Park

Cadman Plaza East, Adams St. bet. Red Cross Pl. and Tillary St.

Brooklyn

Directions via Google Maps

This text is part of Parks’ Historical Signs Project and can be found posted within the park.

"A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,
If it be a few ragged huts it is still the greatest city in the whole world."

This park honors Walt Whitman (1819-1892), poet, journalist, and native New Yorker. Whitman’s vision of an optimistic and self-reliant America surpassed traditional Victorian boundaries and influenced later free thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).

Walt Whitman was born in Huntington, Long Island, where he lived with his family until 1823. Unable to support his household on a carpenter’s salary, Whitman’s father moved the family to the City of Brooklyn, where he enrolled his son in a local grammar school. Although souring economics forced the Whitmans to return to Long Island in 1833, young Walt stayed behind and took work as a printer’s apprentice, his first foray into the world of words.

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