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Brooklyn Mechanics—Sunday Cars

About This Item

  • Title: Brooklyn Mechanics—Sunday Cars
  • Date: 9 May 1857
  • Creator(s): Walt Whitman
  • Whitman Archive ID: per.01457
  • Source: Brooklyn Daily Times, 9 May 1857: 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: Samantha Gilmore Kevin McMullen Karie Cobb
  • Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Brooklyn Mechanics—Sunday Cars." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 16 July 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
  • Source File: per.01457.xml (TEI)
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BROOKLYN MECHANICS—SUNDAY CARS.

Probably the main classes of Brooklynites, whose interests and tastes are least thought of in public affairs, are the mechanics, the working-persons, and their wives and families. Yet these comprise five-sixths of the whole number of our people. Professional politicians, lawyers, merchants, speculators, &c., always make themselves felt, but the mechanics, somehow, are busy all day with their saws, planes, trowels, sledges, and the hundred other implements of their various trades.

For example, the mechanics of this city, every section of it, the Eastern District, (Williamsburgh, Greenpoint, Bushwick, &c.,) New Brooklyn, Bedford, Prospect Hill, Hunterfly road, Clove road, Greenwood, Gowanus, &c., &c., demand, almost without exception, the right and privilege of Sunday conveyance in the municipal railroads, the people's five-cent carriages.

Yet in the contest going on four or five weeks since on the subject, we hardly remember any allusion to the wishes of the Brooklyn mechanics, and their families, in this matter of Sunday Cars. Every body else was thought of (the old theologians of Germany seemed to be allowed very great weight,—also the dicta of Moses in the wilderness,) but the five-sixths of the solid body of the people of consolidated Brooklyn were not thought of!

We are more inclined to press our point, because it is evident to us that the Eastern District is bound to be one of the greatest workshops and places of mechanics' homes in America, and probably in the world. It has all the advantages of situation, water, shore, roominess, healthiness, cheapness of living, contiguity to New York, &c. Gentlemen of the City Hall! and gentlemen of the Railroad Directors' Committee! remember in all your thinkings to think what may be the pleasure and interest of the Brooklyn mechanics!

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