I was on Long Island recently and found myself with a little extra time on my hands. I visited Jones Beach and a few small parks close enough to Hofstra University and Uniondale where my son was staying so I could be on hand if I was needed in a hurry. I cast about for a few things to do and came upon Walt Whitman's Birthplace. Having made past visits to Ernest Hemingway's haunts and houses in Paris, Key West, and Cuba, I thought "why not?".
I received a nice welcome and a personal tour from Iris - one of the staff on site. Iris was engaging, extremely knowledgeable, informative, and fun to chat with. She had nice shoes.
I had a nice time.
Touring the home that was the birthplace of a 19th-century poet may not seem like an exciting day out, but, I'm a man you don't meet every day. The site itself is in Huntington and easily reached from La Guardia and JFK if one is arriving by plane. The grounds feature an interpretive center, gift store, the original house, a groundskeeper's house on the site of the former kitchen, and a small conference center and art gallery on the site of the former barn. Iris gave allowed me access to the art gallery - wonderful photographs on display and played me a few youtube videos concerning Walt in the interpretive center. They were fun.
Whitman was born in the house located here, and though he lived here only until the age of 4, he spent much of his life on Long Island, very near to his birthplace and his many relatives who lived in the area. Long Island remained very important to him his entire life.
The exhibits in the interpretive center feature loads of information and photographs of Whitman. It was fun to see that he (like so many other poets and authors) had self-published the first couple editions of Leaves of Grass - a volume of his poems to which he added to in subsequent editions. Walt was a great self-promoter and wrote many anonymously published glowing reviews of his own work. Sort of like a modern-day Yelp reviewer.
Whitman's work was daring - and laid bare all things human - emotion, sensuality, nature, the lot. His work was considered risky by many, obscene and perverse by a few, and loved the world over. Iris tells me that a great many of the visitors to the center are international travelers. Much like Tom Waits, he was and still is, big in Japan.
The house is a small, 2-story structure built by his father in 1811. His father was an uninterested farmer, a wonderful carpenter, and a very poor businessman. His business acumen is what kept the family moving from place to place throughout Whitman's childhood - just a few steps ahead of the bakers and repo-man. His parents had been Quakers, became humanists, were very interested in Transcendentalism and brought Walt to lectures on the subject. These lectures made a strong impression on Walt and greatly affected his world view and poetry.
Walt also had something of a fixation for Abraham Lincoln. He spent more than two years working in the hospitals in Washington DC, caring for and talking to wounded soldiers, many of whom became friends and lifelong pen pals. Iris tells me that Walt used to go every morning to the White House just to see Abe walk by. Two of Whitman's well-known poems "Oh Captain, My Captain" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" were written in honor of Lincoln. Read them. Check out his summary biography here.
If you're in the neighborhood, check it out. Ask for Iris.
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