One of the joys of Brooklyn is being immersed in history. My apartment is in a house built just after Lincoln’s presidency. Down the street is Brooklyn’s first park designed by Olmsted and Vaux and standing on the site of a Revolutionary War fort. As editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Walt Whitman lobbied for the creation of that park.

Roaming in Thought
Walt Whitman — Leaves of Grass

ROAMING in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality,

And the vast all that is call’d Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.