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Parks for Brooklyn

About This Item

  • Title: Parks for Brooklyn
  • Date: 30 November 1858
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: per.01106
  • Source: Brooklyn Daily Times, 30 November 1858: 2. Our transcription is based on a digital image of a microfilm scan of the original issue. Microfilm of original issue held at Pennsylvania State University Libraries. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the journalism, see our statement of editorial policy.
  • Editorial note: This piece is unsigned, as was the case for most of Whitman's journalism. However, this editorial is part of a series of texts that deal with a coherent theme that has been identified by the Whitman Archive journalism team as likely authored by Whitman. This decision is based on a combination of historical and (auto)biographical accounts, similarity to contemporary Whitman writings, a history of scholarly attribution, extant clippings retained by Whitman, computational stylometric analysis, and, in some cases, manuscript evidence in Whitman’s hand.
  • Contributors to digital file: Kaylen Michaelis Samantha Gilmore Brandi Faulkner Stefan Schöberlein Karie Cobb
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Parks for Brooklyn." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 17 July 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: per.01106.xml (TEI)
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PARKS FOR BROOKLYN.

Owners and agents of real estate near the Ridgewood reservoir are strongly of opinion that the Common Council should initiate measures for forming a great central park of seven or eight hundred acres around the reservoir, at an expense of several millions. This is going a-head too fast. Let us know for certain what the "little bill" we have already incurred for water, and the other little bill we are about to incur for sewerage, amount to, before we talk of spending any more millions in public works. Parks are required, of all cities, least in a suburban city like Brooklyn; and of all locations Ridgewood is the last that we need a park in —for close by are the beautiful and rapidly improving cemeteries of Cypress Hills and Evergreens —which will when finished be park enough for ten times our present population. And there is the open country just behind, so that no "breathing spots," as parks are called, are needed there. If we are to have parks, let us locate them where they will supplant disease and miasma, and occupy ground otherwise certain to be haunts of vice and low-lived misery. The 14th and 12th wards of the city are the localities were parks should be made, some quarter century hence; but at present and until that period we have quite as much open space and as many breathing spots as our population require.

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