Walt Whitman’s New York

May 31, 2019, is the 200th birthday of the most important writer ever to come out of New York. This tour will focus on his Manhattan life: the “vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse,” the life of Broadway where Whitman reveled in opera, theater, lecture halls, and minstrel shows, the pre-Civil War city of omnibuses, volunteer fire companies, a SoHo (not yet so called) that mixed pricey retailers and houses of ill repute, the phrenology vogue, and a world of writers divided between an older generation of gentleman scribes and a younger set indulging “bohemian” ways. Surprisingly many buildings remain from Whitman’s “city of orgies, walks and joys.”