57-58). Thoreau spent a few months in the city in 1843 but was appalled by the crowds: “Seeing so many people from day to day one comes to have less respect for flesh and bones,” he wrote to a friend. “It must have a very bad influence on children to see so many human beings at once—mere herds of men” (Lopate, p. 73). Poe mocked the dirty dealings of city businessmen in “Doings of Gotham,” a series of articles written for out of towners in 1844. And native New Yorker Herman Melville was the first to capture the urban alienation still felt by Manhattanites, in his 1853 tale “Bartleby the Scrivener.”

Writing for Brooklyn and New York newspapers for much of the 1840s and part of the 1850s, Whitman was employed to take note of the changes and report on the city’s big events. He wrote about the opening of the Croton Aqueduct in 1842, which brought running water to city residents; he commented on the Astor Place Opera House riots, in which more than twenty people were killed in 1849; he attended the opening of the Crystal Palace on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street in 1853. But his interest in city life extended beyond his duties as a reporter. After work, he’d leave his office on “Newspaper Row” (just east of City Hall Park) and take long walks, wandering through the “Bloody Sixth” ward and the crime-infested, impoverished streets of Five Points. Another favorite activity was “looking in at the shop-windows in Broadway the whole forenoon .... pressing the flesh of my nose to the thick plate-glass” (“[Song of Myself],” p. 65), especially with the opening of so many elegant photography studios in the 1840s. The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities and the Phrenological Cabinet of the Fowler Brothers and Samuel Wells were other frequent destinations. To cover longer distances, he rode the omnibuses up and down the glorious avenues, singing at the top of his lungs. Whitman started carrying a small note- book, jotting down his thoughts during his daily morning and evening commutes on the Brooklyn ferry. And somewhere along the way, he fell in love with the noise and filth, crowds and congestion, problems and promise of New York.

This is the city .... and I am one of the citizens;
Whatever interests the rest interests me .... politics, churches,
newspapers, schools,
Benevolent societies, improvements, banks, tariffs, steamships,
factories, markets,
Stocks and stores and real estate and personal estate
(“[Song of Myself],” p. 79).

Whitman found cause to celebrate the same elements of city life that others had criticized or overlooked. He was the first American writer to embrace urban street culture, finding energy, beauty, and humanity in the meanest sights and sounds of the city.

The blab of the pave .... the tires of carts and sluff of
bootsoles and talk of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb,
the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The carnival of sleighs, the clinking and shouted jokes and
pelts of snowballs;
The hurrahs for popular favorites .... the fury of roused mobs
(“[Song of Myself],” p. 36).

The cultural offerings of New York were another source of inspiration to Whitman. He fully embraced the city’s opera rage, which began in April 1847 when an Italian company opened at his beloved Park Theatre. The Astor Place Opera House also opened that year; with 1,500 seats it was America’s largest theater until the Academy of Music opened in Manhattan in 1854. From the late 1840s through the 1850s, Whitman saw dozens of operas, on assignment and for his own pleasure. By the time Leaves of Grass went to press, he had heard at least sixteen major singers make their New York debuts. Jenny Lind, P. T. Barnum’s “Swedish nightingale,” had been a smash success at her debut in Castle Garden in 1850; but a personal favorite of Whitman’s was Marietta Alboni, who arrived at the Metropolitan Opera in 1852 and is said to have inspired these passionate lines:

I hear the trained soprano ....