There are over 13,000 broadsides from the Harris Broadsides Collection currently available in the digital repository, with more being added as we work our way through digitizing the collection. This week, a brochure prepared by the American Society of Poets in the 1950s stood out as an artifact of interest. Walt Whitman’s Manhattan of the Forties: A Walk Through Printing House Square and Environs features a walk which reconstructs aspects of Walt Whitman’s New York in the early 1840s, when the city was “speeding toward the line separating the Knickerbocker town from its future materialization as an industrial metropolis”, and is peppered with Whitman’s poetry and anecdotes of mid nineteenth century life in the city.

The walk begins at St. Paul’s Chapel crosses over Broadway, continues up Ann, with a left onto Nassau to Park Place, on to City Hall, ending at Duane and Broadway. The brochure identifies sites and buildings with Whitman’s early career, at the time when he started to write for the newspapers. “It was here that Whitman worked as a reported in a milieu of corrupt politicians, cutthroat newspaper practices, yellow journalism.” The reader is urged to try and visualize Whitman at age 22, “a natty dresser, he probably looked like his stylish counterparts, who piddle and patter here in collars and tailed coats.”

The buildings and sites identified along the walk are the Astor House, the American Museum, The Evening Tattler (where Whitman served as editor in 1842), the printing shop of Park Benjamin (where Whitman worked as a printer upon first arriving in New York), and The Evening Mirror (Edgar Allan Poe began writing for the Mirror in 1844 and spent his noon hours across the street at Sandy Welsh’s (a famous beer cellar and popular hangout for newspaper men.) The New York Leader, Fowler’s Phrenological Cabinet (“where charts and physiological exhibits were on display to advertise this pseudo-science”), The Broadway Journal (also edited by Poe), Democratic Review, Tribune, Evening Post, The Aurora, The Evening Tattler, and Printing House Square are also identified. Printing House Square is the former home to The New York Times, The Sun, and the Tribune. All that remains of the square today is a memorial plaque and statue of Benjamin Franklin. The walk continues past Tammany Hall, the Empire Club (“gathering place for Five Points gangsters”) , Five Points (at that time, “a squalid cesspool of crime”), City Hall Park, the Tabernacle (deplored by contemporary writers as “a huge unsightly pile” and “a dingy mongrel place”), and many Boarding Houses, where in the 1840s “possibly more than half the population of the city lived, not only single young men like Walt Whitman, but couples like Mr. & Mrs. Edgar Allan Poe.”

The brochure cites several texts, suggesting that “taking one or two along on this tour would give the walker the best of all companionship.” The following titles from the list are available at the Brown University Library.
The times of Melville and Whitman
Last days of Knickerbocker life in New York
Nooks & corners of old New York
A tour around New York, and my summer acre
Domestic manners of the Americans
The memorial history of the City of New-York, from its first settlement to the year 1892
Autobiographia; or, the story of a life