Walt Whitman Residence

Walt Whitman lived in some thirty homes across New York City. This modest wood-frame house in Clinton Hill is the only one still standing — and it happens to be the one that matters most. Whitman lived here from May 1855 to May 1856 with his mother, his dying father and four brothers, and it was here that he completed and self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in June 1855. Those original twelve poems, with their frank celebration of the body and of comradeship between men, became the fountainhead of queer American poetry; the later "Calamus" poems made Whitman an icon of male-male love quoted by generations who had almost no one else to quote. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his famous letter greeting Whitman "at the beginning of a great career" in July 1855 — and visited him at this house that December. The house itself, built 1854-55, has been altered heavily: a third story was added in 1890 and the facade is now vinyl-sided, hiding what remains of the original details. It holds no landmark designation and sits in no historic district — a 2017 evaluation request and a sustained campaign around Whitman's 2019 bicentennial have so far failed to secure protection, making this arguably the most at-risk LGBTQ-history building in Brooklyn. What you see today: a private, occupied, unmarked house. There is no plaque here — Whitman markers stand elsewhere in Brooklyn, at Old Fulton Street and Fulton Ferry Landing. Come for the significance, not the spectacle: you are looking at the room where Leaves of Grass was finished, and that is the whole, quietly extraordinary point.