{"id":13482,"date":"2019-06-24T09:48:59","date_gmt":"2019-06-24T13:48:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phillyhistory.wpengine.com\/?p=13482"},"modified":"2019-06-24T11:06:39","modified_gmt":"2019-06-24T15:06:39","slug":"a-walt-whitman-bridge-the-good-gray-poet-wouldnt-want-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2019\/06\/a-walt-whitman-bridge-the-good-gray-poet-wouldnt-want-it\/","title":{"rendered":"A Walt Whitman Bridge? The Good Gray Poet Wouldn\u2019t Want It."},"content":{"rendered":"

No matter how much Walt Whitman\u2019s philosophical beliefs and sexual preferences rankled the priests of Camden<\/a>, no matter how many mimeographed form letters of protest were sent in by Camden\u2019s parochial schoolchildren, the Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA) held firm. The new bridge<\/a> would bear Whitman’s name.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Smith and Windmill Islands – Delaware River Near Foot of Chestnut Street, Frederick Gutekunst, 1891 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Thing is, Whitman didn’t much care for bridges. But the Good Gray Poet had been dead for six decades when the DRPA deliberated on the new bridge’s name. But if he could have been consulted on the matter, Whitman would have declined the honor. “I have always had a passion for ferries,\u201d he wrote, \u201cto me they afford inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems.”<\/p>\n

Back in Brooklyn at the mid-century, Whitman regularly crossed the East River to Manhattan, often making his way up into the ferry\u2019s pilot-houses where he could take in the \u201cfull sweep, absorbing shows, accompaniments, surroundings.\u201d He had no kind words to share when construction of the Brooklyn Bridge got underway in the 1870s. Anyway, by then, living in bridge-free Camden, Whitman doubled down on his passion, finding in each ferry ride crossing the Delaware\u00a0 River a \u201crefreshment of spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whitman\u2019s ideal crossing was about experience, not efficiency. On the deck of a bridge, high above the water, he’d be disconnected from the river\u2019s sounds, sights and smells – its culture. Sure, crossing would go faster on a bridge, but it would deny Whitman what a city by a river city was all about, what he lived for.<\/p>\n

In \u201cCrossing Brooklyn Ferry,\u201d his poem of 1856, Whitman transforms would-be mundane mid-nineteenth-century experience into something glorious and transformative. \u201cCrossing\u201d confirmed not only Whitman\u2019s utter joy in the moment (\u201cFlood-tide below me! I see you face to face! \/ Clouds of the west\u2014sun there half an hour high\u2014I see you also face to face\u201d) but, as Whitman scholar Howard Nelson points out, Whitman expected such moments would always be part of urban life:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Detail – Delaware River Near Foot of Chestnut Street. Frederick Gutekunst, photographer, 1891. (PhillyHistory)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Others will see the islands large and small;<\/em><\/p>\n

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,<\/em><\/p>\n

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,<\/em><\/p>\n

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.<\/em><\/p>\n

However, “a hundred years hence,” both ferries were gone. \u201cWhitman did not foresee the demise of the ferries,\u201d explains Nelson, he assumed “people in the future would, like him, see the gulls turning in late afternoon light, the rise and fall of tides, the river flowing, and the sun\u2026\u201d\u00a0Such experiences even suggested \u201ca kind of immortality.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI have never lived away from a big river,” wrote Whitman. “I don’t know what I should do without the ferry, & river, & crossing, day & night.” After a debilitating stroke in 1873, Whitman regarded the Camden Ferry as therapy, crossing back and forth as many as half a dozen times in a day. To assure access, he bought a house within walking distance of the ferry landing. Toward the end of his life, too frail to make his way to the waterfront, Whitman delighted in having it come to him. “One of the watermen came to see me yesterday afternoon & told me all ab’t the river & ferry (of wh’ I knew so much & was fond-but now kept from a year & more).”<\/p>\n

In New York, the Brooklyn Bridge (built 1869-1883) eventually killed off Whitman\u2019s treasured Fulton Ferry. It\u2019s last crossing took place in 1924. Likewise, Philadelphia\u2019s Delaware River Bridge (later renamed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) did away with Whitman\u2019s much-loved Camden ferry on March 31, 1952 when the Millville, skippered by Capt. Clayton E. Dibble, pulled away from Philadelphia for the final time. Construction of the Walt Whitman Bridge began one year later.<\/p>\n

Today, crossing the Delaware in the style of Whitman is not only impossible, it\u2019s an unfamiliar experience. All we have are left to remind us are Whitman\u2019s words:<\/p>\n

\u201cThen the Camden ferry. What exhilaration, change, people, business by day. What soothing, silent wondrous hours, at night, crossing on the boat, most all to myself\u2014pacing the deck, alone, forward or aft. What communion with the waters, the air, the exquisite chiaroscuro\u2014the sky and stars, that speak no word, nothing to the intellect, yet so eloquent, so communicative to the soul.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Detail – Delaware River Near Foot of Chestnut Street. Frederick Gutekunst, photographer, 1891. (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“A January Night.\u2014Fine trips across the wide Delaware tonight. Tide pretty high, and a strong ebb. River, a little after 8, full of ice, mostly broken, but some large cakes making out strong timber\u2019d steamboat hum and quiver as she strikes them. In the clear moonlight they spread, strange, unearthly, silvery, faintly glistening as far as I can see. Bumping, trembling, sometimes hissing like a thousand snakes, the tide-procession, as we went with or through it, affording a grand undertone, in keeping with the scene. Overhead, the splendor is indescribable, yet something haughty, almost supercilious, in the night. Never did I realize more latent sentiment, almost passion, in those silent interminable stars up there. \u2026<\/p>\n

“Night of March 18 \u201979.\u2014On the edges of the river, many lamps twinkling\u2014with two or three huge chimneys, a couple of miles up, belching forth molten, steady flames, volcano-like, illuminating all around\u2014and sometimes an electric or calcium, its Dante-Inferno gleams, in far shafts, terrible, ghastly-powerful. Of later May nights, crossing, I like to watch the fishermen’s little buoy-lights\u2014so pretty, so dreamy\u2014like corpse candles\u2014undulating delicate and lonesome on the surface of the shadowy waters, floating with the current.<\/p>\n

“April 5, 1879.\u2014With the return of spring to the skies, airs, waters of the Delaware, return the sea-gulls. I never tire of watching their broad and easy flight, in spirals, or as they oscillate with slow unflapping wings, or look down with curved beak, or dipping to the water after food. The crows, plenty enough all through the winter, have vanish’d with the ice. Not one of them now to be seen. The steamboats have again come forth \u2014 bustling up, handsome, freshly painted, for summer work \u2014 the Columbia, the Edwin Forrest, (the Republic not yet out,) the Reybold, the Nelly White, the Twilight, the Ariel, the Warner, the Perry, the Taggart, the Jersey Blue \u2014 even the hulky old Trenton \u2014 not forgetting those saucy little bull-pups of the current, the steamtugs.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor two hours I cross\u2019d and recross\u2019d, merely for pleasure\u2014for a still excitement. Both sky and river went through several changes. …”<\/p>\n

[Sources<\/em>: Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry<\/a> (first published in Leaves of Grass<\/em>, 1856); Walt Whitman, Specimen Days in America<\/a><\/em>, (Philadelphia: Rees Welsh & Co., 1882); \u201cFerryboats Span Delaware Tonight for Last Time,\u201d The Philadelphia Inquirer,<\/em> March 31, 1952; Arthur Geffen, \u201cSilence and Denial: Walt Whitman and the Brooklyn Bridge,\u201d Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, vol. 1, no. 4 (1984),(PDF)<\/a>;\u00a0Joann P. Krieg, \u201cDemocracy in Action: Naming the Bridge for Walt Whitman,\u201d Walt Whitman Quarterly Review<\/em>, vol. 12, no. 2 ( 1994),\u00a0(PDF)<\/a>; Howard Nelson, \u201c\u2019Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ [1856]<\/a>,\u201d (from J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds., Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia<\/em> (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998); M. Jimmie Killingsworth, \u201cWalt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics<\/a>,\u201d The Walt Whitman Archive (first published by the University of Iowa Press, 2004).]<\/p>\n

For more posts on the naming of the Walt Whitman Bridge, click here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No matter how much Walt Whitman\u2019s philosophical beliefs and sexual preferences rankled the priests of Camden, no matter how many mimeographed form letters of protest were sent in by Camden\u2019s parochial schoolchildren, the Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA) held firm. The new bridge would bear Whitman’s name. Thing is, Whitman didn’t much care for bridges. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}