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from 255 in 1846 to 683 in 1853 (when they carried over a hundred thousand passengers a day)” (Burrows and Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, p. 653). People were flocking to the city from the outside: While 667,000 immigrants arrived in the United States between 1820 and 1839, 4,242,000 came between 1840 and 1859. “By 1855 over half the city’s residents hailed from outside the United States,” note Burrows and Wallace (pp. 736-737). Most of them were impoverished peasants and workers from Ireland and Germany.
    Visitors and residents alike were quick to comment on the negative aspects of the city’s social and economic boom. British actor Fanny Kemble marveled at the diversity of the city’s population in her 1832 journal, but was outraged by the prejudice and racism she witnessed (Lopate, pp. 25, 27). Touring New York in 1842, Charles Dickens was taken aback by the treatment of the poor, as well as the pigs roaming noisy, filthy streets (Lopate, pp. 57-58). Thoreau spent a few months in the city in 1843 but was appalled by the crowds: “Seeing so many people from day to day one comes to have less respect for flesh and bones,” he wrote to a friend. “It must have a very bad influence on children to see so many human beings at once—mere herds of men” (Lopate, p. 73). Poe mocked the dirty dealings of city businessmen in “Doings of Gotham,” a series of articles written for out of towners in 1844. And native New Yorker Herman Melville was the first to capture the urban alienation still felt by Manhattanites, in his 1853 tale “Bartleby the Scrivener.”
    Writing for Brooklyn and New York newspapers for much of the 1840s and part of the 1850s, Whitman was employed to take note of the changes and report on the city’s big events. He wrote about the opening of the Croton Aqueduct in 1842, which brought running water to city residents; he commented on the Astor Place Opera House riots, in which more than twenty people were killed in 1849; he attended the opening of the Crystal Palace on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street in 1853. But his interest in city life extended beyond his duties as a reporter. After work, he’d leave his office on “Newspaper Row” (just east of City Hall Park) and take long walks, wandering through the “Bloody Sixth” ward and the crime-infested, impoverished streets of Five Points. Another favorite activity was “looking in at the shop-windows in Broadway the whole forenoon .... pressing the flesh of my nose to the thick plate-glass” (“[Song of Myself],” p. 65), especially with the opening of so many elegant photography studios in the 1840s. The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities and the Phrenological Cabinet of the Fowler Brothers and Samuel Wells were other frequent destinations. To cover longer distances, he rode the omnibuses up and down the glorious avenues, singing at the top of his lungs. Whitman started carrying a small note- book, jotting down his thoughts during his daily morning and evening commutes on the Brooklyn ferry. And somewhere along the way, he fell in love with the noise and filth, crowds and congestion, problems and promise of New York.
    This is the city .... and I am one of the citizens;
Whatever interests the rest interests me .... politics, churches,
newspapers, schools,
Benevolent societies, improvements, banks, tariffs, steamships,
factories, markets,
Stocks and stores and real estate and personal estate
(“[Song of Myself],” p. 79).
    Whitman found cause to celebrate the same elements of city life that others had criticized or overlooked. He was the first American writer to embrace urban street culture, finding energy, beauty, and humanity in the meanest sights and sounds of the city.
    The blab of the pave .... the tires of carts and sluff of
bootsoles and talk of the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb,
the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The carnival of sleighs, the clinking