Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [562]
Assuming a flaneuresque persona, the Aurora’s editor promised his readers a regular reckoning with “this great, dirty, blustering, glorious, ill-lighted, aristocratic, squalid, rich, wicked, and magnificent metropolis.” Duding himself up—his daguerreotypes depict a sophisticated dandy in frock coat and fashionable hat—he strolled around town, sporting a polished cane, absorbing scenes and characters. Whitman particularly explored the plebeian world of popular culture, visiting fire companies, gambling dens, whorehouses, and theaters, and he wrote up richly detailed sketches of newsboys, pawnbrokers, stage drivers, salesclerks, and butchers. He also captured the excitement of being on Broadway, reporting from atop a mobbed Yellow Bird omnibus or from a pavement crammed with enough people “to make one continued, ceaseless, devilish provoking, delicious, glorious jam!”
As a New York booster, Whitman was hard to top. Manhattan, he wrote, was “the great place of the Western Continent, the heart, the brain, the focus, the main spring, the pinnacle, the extremity, the no more beyond of the new world.” Yet he was not blind to its negatives. Whitman worried particularly about the city’s obliteration of its past, its “rabid, feverish, itching for change.” At one point he recounted the efforts of a large crowd of women to block workmen from digging up a Baptist cemetery at Crystie and Delancey, noting that in the end the speculators—“a set of miserable wretches” who wanted the land for house lots—succeeded in “desecrating the very grave in order to add something to their ill won heaps of gold.”
Dismissed from the Aurora, Whitman leapt nimbly from job to job. He worked as a penny-a-liner for the Daily Plebeian, run by Loco Foco Levi Slamm. He knocked out a popular temperance novel, Franklin Evans the Inebriate, admixing praise for the Washingtonian temperancites with sensational descriptions of miscegenation and murder (“damned rot,” he’d later say). He covered the courts and prison for Beach’s Sun (he would write a piece on jailhouse lawyers called “Tomb Shysters of Gotham”), contributed to Willis and Morris’s New-York Mirror, edited the Democrat (a party paper), and wrote for the Broadway Journal, where he met Poe when picking up his pay and found him “very kindly and human” if “perhaps a little jaded.” Clearly Whitman had mastered the art—better than had Poe—of staying afloat in a quicksilver literary marketplace.
Whitman’s housing arrangements were equally peripatetic. He moved repeatedly between boardinghouses on Spring, John, Vesey, and Duane streets until 1845. Then, after four years in Manhattan’s fast lane, dismayed to be still earning less than five dollars a week in an ever more viciously competitive industry, he returned to slower-paced Brooklyn, where his parents and five siblings had come to take another stab at housebuilding and where he would stay for the next seventeen years.
In March 1846 Whitman became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In the morning he penned editorials in his Fulton Street office, which commanded a good view of the ferry landing, then set out in search of stories. He might take a stagecoach to Fort Greene or Green-Wood Cemetery, attend a Sunday school picnic in Jamaica, drop in on sermons by Brooklyn preachers, or head south to Coney Island for a swim in its “beautiful, pure, sparkling, sea-water!”
Whitman was now a Brooklyn booster—he