Walt Whitman Barbaric Yawp 5K

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There are nine Walt Whitman-related sites near my house. I mapped out a 5K course that passes each one. It starts near a modest, unmarked home Whitman lived in when he published Leaves of Grass and ends at Fulton Ferry landing, where a line from Whitman's great poem "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is cut into panels on the railings.

The house is quite a story. The journalist Paul Berman helped to uncover its existence in a 1995 New Yorker article. Here's the link, but you'll need a subscription to read it. (Alternatively, check out this this Poetry Foundation article on 99 Ryerson.)

Berman knocked on the door of the house:

The door opened and two brothers peered out. I introduced myself and told them the exciting antiquarian news that in their own home the greatest of American poets had once lived—more than a century ago.

Then one of them—it was Mr. Clifford Richardson, a highly trained electrician (as I later learned) with a sideline as a "Watongo," reggae singer—cocked his head and asked, in the accent of St. Kitt's, "How do you know there isn't a great poet living here now?"

I love Brooklyn. And I love my neighborhood.

(And for once, I won a 5K. First prize was an electronic edition of Leaves of Grass. And of course the t-shirt.)

Run to the Hall Fame for Great Americans, the Bronx... via the Brooklyn Bridge, Hudson River paths, and the three Heights

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The Hall of Fame for Great Americans is on the campus of Bronx Community College, which may be the grandest community college you'll ever see. Until the early 1970s, the campus belonged to New York University. The three main buildings—Gould Memorial Library, Philosophy Hall and Language Hall—were designed by Stanford White. (If you read Ragtime, you'll recall White as the architect who was murdered by Harry K. Thaw.) Gould Library, in particular, is considered one of White's greatest works. It sits on the crest of the highest point in the city.

Wrapped around the back of Gould is a colonnade, which became the Hall of Fame. This was the first and, for a time, most famous "Hall of Fame" in America. It was inspired by similar tributes to national cultural and political heroes in Europe: The Pantheon in Paris, Westminster Abbey in London, and Munich's Ruhmeshalle. Since the '70s, the Hall has fallen into obscurity, and it no longer elects new honorees. Here's how the New York Times described it last year:

On a leafy hilltop, dozens of busts of once-famous men stare mournfully at an empty walkway, their unfamiliar names chiseled in grand letters, their feats now obscure.

Josiah W. Gibbs? Augustus Saint-Gaudens? Welcome to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, a lonely outpost in the University Heights section of the Bronx.

...

Today, the colonnaded hall sits high above the city as an awkward appendage to the campus of Bronx Community College. To history buffs, it is a forgotten gem; to nearly everyone else, it is just forgotten.

While the college faculty has sought to integrate the Hall of Fame into the school’s curriculum, the disconnect between the honorees and the student body has grown only wider, leaving even the hall’s few defenders to acknowledge that it is in desperate need of a face-lift. More than half of the college’s students are Hispanic; the Hall of Fame, however, honors few women and even fewer minorities.

The Hall of Fame is definitely a forgotten, obscure, bit of New York, but the story overdoes the idea that the honorees are themselves forgotten and obscure (and somehow completely irrelevant to anyone whose parents speak Spanish.) Harriet Beecher Stowe? Abraham Lincoln? Mark Twain? FDR? These are obscure? Anyway, I have to agree that it would be great to see this overlooked city landmark revived and updated, not to mention diversified.

I couldn't take as many pictures here as I wanted. It was a holiday, so the campus was technically closed (although the gate was wide open.) The security guards who stopped me on the quad were unhappy about me taking pictures of the buildings. They were nice enough about it--they let me go to the Hall of Fame and take pictures there. But the rest of the campus apparently can't be photographed. Seems like a crazy rule to me, even post 9-11. Then again, the jogger with a camera probably seemed just as crazy to them.

On the way to the Bronx, I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and ran along the Hudson until I got to Morningside Heights. From there I went to Hamilton Heights and the gorgeous campus of CCNY, one of my favorite spots in the city. (This run turned out to have a collegiate theme.) Next came the eastern end of Washington Heights and the University Heights Bridge over the Harlem River. After leaving BCC, I ran another mile or so in University Heights to the subway. All told, I ran a bit over 19 miles.

Running the Walker's city: To Brownsville via Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights and Crown Heights. Returning through Bedford-Stuyvesant

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The morning before this run, I re-read a big chunk of A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin's 1946 memoir of growing up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The terrific opening lines capture the style of the whole book—psychologically and sensorially vivid, constantly locating his Brownsville on both the geographic and social maps:

Every time I go back to Brownsville it is as if I have never been away. From the moment I step off the train at Rockaway Avenue and smell the leak out of the men's room, then the pickles from the stand just below the subway steps, an instant rage comes over me, mixed with dread and some unexpected tenderness. It is over ten years since I left to live in "the city"—everything just out of Brownsville was always "the city."

I've captioned some of the pictures with lines from the book. I like being able to point to some of the history of the places I saw, as well as to how sticky Kazin's prose proved to be—how it can still resonate as you look at a neighborhood generations removed from the memory. But today's Brownsville is from separated from Kazin's by more than time; the immigrant Jewish community of his boyhood is almost entirely gone, and Brownsville is now mostly black and Latino. So I wouldn't like to give the impression that I'm trying to invoke some richer past while pointing my camera at the ghosts left behind. Brownsville is unmistakeably a tough, poor neighborhood—it always was—but the place I saw while passing through is very much alive and worth seeing on its own terms. (If the streets in these pictures sometimes look a bit empty, bear in mind it was a 28-degree Sunday morning.) The "downtown" along Pitkin still and the former pushcart market on Belmont still have more foot-traffic and commerce than most American downtowns outside of NYC; on the side streets, many of the tenements have been replaced by a a lot of public housing, but also rowhouses built by the Nehemiah Plan, a grassroots, church-backed effort to build houses for low-income homeowners.

On the way to Brownsville, my run passed by the Pratt family mansions in Clinton Hill and traveled most of the distance along Eastern Parkway. The parkway was planned by Olmsted and Vaux, and according to the Parks Department, they coined the term "parkway" for it. It cuts through Crown Heights, home to a large Caribbean community as well as Chassidic Jews. I'm not sure why, but the day of my run, it also had the most visible NYPD presence I've ever seen outside of Times Square or the financial district. (You'll see some of that in the pictures.) The run back is through Bedford-Stuyvesant, including Stuyvesant Heights, which has some of the most beautiful brownstone blocks in the city. I ended on the campus of the Pratt Institute, and took some pictures of the art.

The run was about 12 miles. Up next: a run all the way up the West Side to the Bronx and the Hall of Fame of Great Americans.

Flatbush Avenue run... all the way down to the Rockaways, ending on Broad Channel Island, Queens

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As far as I can tell, only four Brooklyn streets cross the borough from end to end. Metropolitan and Greenpoint slice the narrow northern tip, and Atlantic runs east-west through the thick upper-middle. Flatbush is the only one that runs north-south, or from bridge to bridge.

The street is named for the Town of Flatbush, or Vlackebos ("level forest"), founded as part of Nieuw-Nederland in 1652. Today the neighborhood of Central Flatbush is home to a large Caribbean community, but there are remnants of the old Dutch settlement all along this run. Flatbush runs into the Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Bridge, which crosses Jamaica Bay to the Rockaways in Queens. I reached the beach and then headed east for the Cross Bay Bridge, which took me to Broad Channel--perhaps the oddest neighborhood in all New York City. You'll see.

This run was 17.9 miles.

Run to Sunnyside Gardens, Queens... via the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Blissville and Sunnyside

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There was a time when reformist urban planners embraced the suburb. Sunnyside Gardens remains an example of suburbanism at its best. Here's how the AIA Guide to New York City describes it:

Seventy-seven acres of barren, mosquito-infested land were transformed into a great and successful experiment in urban housing design by the City Housing Corporation... Forced into using the preordained street grid, architects Stein and Wright arranged row housing to face both the street and the interior garden spaces. Walk under umbrellas of London plane trees along the paths that penetrate each block, where the architecture is unimportant, but the urban arrangements a source of urbane delight. Lewis Mumford lived here from 1925 to 1936.

Sunnyside Gardens is part of the larger community of Sunnyside, which is known for it's large populations of Asian, Latin American and Irish immigrants.

This run was about 13.5 miles. Along the way, it passes through the sparsely populated area (unless you count 3 million dead people) along the Newtown Creek, a body of water most New Yorkers couldn't name even if they've crossed it a thousand times. I found an interesting blog about this placeless place, by a much, much better photographer: Newtown Pentacle. The next run will be a one-way down the entire length of Flatbush, to Rockaway and the island neighborhood of Broad Channel.

Here's my GPS unit's map of the run.