Walt Whitman Park

Walt Whitman Park is a small park on Cadman Plaza West at Orange Street in Brooklyn Heights, honoring the poet Walt Whitman, who lived in Brooklyn for much of his adult life and wrote portions of his masterwork Leaves of Grass while working at the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper and other Brooklyn publications.

Whitman is considered one of the greatest poets in American literature, and his connection to Brooklyn was deep and lasting. He walked Brooklyn's streets, rode its ferries (celebrated in his poem 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry'), and found inspiration in the borough's diverse population and waterfront energy.

The park features a bust of Whitman, benches, and plantings in a small setting near the Brooklyn Historical Society and the courts of Downtown Brooklyn. The park's location in Brooklyn Heights places it in the same neighborhood where Whitman lived during some of his most productive years.

Whitman's poetry celebrated the democratic energy of American life, the beauty of the human body, and the transcendent potential of ordinary experience. His vision of America as a vast, inclusive, and endlessly creative nation resonated deeply with the diversity he encountered on Brooklyn's streets.

Walt Whitman Park connects modern Brooklyn to its most important literary figure, honoring a poet who saw in the borough's working waterfront, crowded ferries, and diverse population the raw material of a new American literature that would speak to all people.