Etiam pulvinar consectetur dolor sed malesuada. Ut convallis
euismod dolor nec pretium. Nunc ut tristique massa.
Nam sodales mi vitae dolor ullamcorper et vulputate enim accumsan.
Morbi orci magna, tincidunt vitae molestie nec, molestie at mi. Nulla nulla lorem,
suscipit in posuere in, interdum non magna.
The following quick blogpost is to provide some tips on our location projects. I decided to go to the Brooklyn Historical Society today and start my search on my location (120 Prince Street). The first step I recommend is by starting with your designated year of your location and find it in Atlas Map. It will guide your investigation throughout the day.
decided to go to the Brooklyn Historical Society today and start my search on my location (120 Prince Street). The first step I recommend is by starting with your designated year or your location and find it in Atlas Map. It will guide your investigation throughout the day.
For every Atlas map you look at, get the following information:
1. Year plus Volume – It’s important you label your data and notes as things can get confusing very quickly.
2. Your block number
3. The page you found your location
4. The area which can be found in the first couple pages of your Atlas map. Think of it as the Index.
5. Get the cross streets and intersections NEAR your location. This will help your search and when you move to other time periods, you are able to correlate location data.
6. Count how many houses from the corners is your location
7. Note the color of the structure which will identify the material
8. How many floors does your structure have?
This is not everything list but this should give you some ideas.I highly recommend drawing a picture or taking a set of photos. My location is weird, my streets were renamed and my block was divided by another street. I am thankful that a Elizabeth helped me put the pieces together.
After you have found your location on all the maps, you should move to the Land Conveyances.
Find out your block number start searching. You may have to refer back to your map data to make some sense of the land conveyances. You should be looking for key information like:
1. A particular buyer or sell that shows up a lot
2. Changes on the structure of your block and the day they occurred.
3. Any Whitman names in the Grantor/Grantee lists. One of our classmates found Whitman’s father which gave him an additional lead.
4. Any landmarks or important buildings
The building numbers may change but you should be using your main location from the Atlas map and try to find the physical location, the number is secondary.
There isn’t one way to do this kind of research. Different locations will yield different results but I have to be fairly thorough and methodical in the ways I look for information. As I continue to do my own research, I will post some tips for my classmates. If anyone has any questions, just comment so I can clarify on my post. That way, everyone can benefit.
Refer to the “How to do House and Building Research at BHS” handout. I think the key thing is to collect as must relevant data and search through all the different resources available to continue finding leads and piece everything together.
For every Atlas map you look at, get the following information:
1. Year plus Volume – It’s important you label your data and notes as things can get confusing very quickly.
2. Your block number
3. The page you found your location
4. The area which can be found in the first couple pages of your Atlas map. Think of it as the Index.
5. Get the cross streets and intersections NEAR your location. This will help your search and when you move to other time periods, you are able to correlate location data.
6. Count how many houses from the corners is your location
7. Note the color of the structure which will identify the material
8. How many floors does your structure have?
This is not everything list but this should give you some ideas. I highly recommend drawing a picture or taking a set of photos. My location is weird, my streets were renamed and my block was divided by another street. I am thankful that a Elizabeth helped me put the pieces together.
After you have found your location on all the maps, you should move to the Land Conveyances.
Find out your block number start searching. You may have to refer back to your map data to make some sense of the land conveyances. You should be looking for key information like:
1. A particular buyer or sell that shows up a lot
2. Changes on the structure of your block and the day they occurred.
3. Any Whitman names in the Grantor/Grantee lists. One of our classmates found Whitman’s father which gave him an additional lead.
4. Any landmarks or important buildings
The building numbers may change but you should be using your main location from the Atlas map and try to find the physical location, the number is secondary.There isn’t one way to do this kind of research. Different locations will yield different results but I have to be fairly thorough and methodical in the ways I look for information. As I continue to do my own research, I will post some tips for my classmates. If anyone has any questions, just comment so I can clarify on my post. That way, everyone can benefit. Refer to the “How to do House and Building Research at BHS” handout. I think the key thing is to collect as much relevant data and search through all the different resources available to continue finding leads and piece everything together.
Despite having taken at least 200 photo’s, filmed at least 30 minutes worth of video and helping to contribute to a semesters worth of well researched, creative Whitman related projects, I’ve actually had quite a bit of trouble writing this post.
Although I was the only Tech student able to attend the Whitman Conference, there was a diverse mix of opinions, cultures and presentations that somehow managed to include all aspects of the project. For example the students from Novi Sad translated Whitman’s poems into Serbian while the students from Mary Washington came up with a mix of Papers, Poems and Video Projects.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. To start with, the train ride over was absolutely gorgeous. Looking out the window, I saw streams, open fields and old buildings – things you don’t see that often in the city (At least not without having to pay or wander deep into the middle of a large park).
In a way, there was a physical time line along the tracks. The closer we got to Camden, the older the buildings. Most of the remaining structures were churches, mansions or old factories.
The Camden Campus was everything you’d expect from a dorm college. Besides large yet somehow unimposing buildings that housed classes, the campus was large with plenty of areas to lounge around or study outside of class, and of course a Starbucks because far and few between are the college students who can go the entirety of their academic career without coffee.
After a short wait, the rest of the students arrived and I was finally able to put faces to some of the writers whose work I’d read over the semester. It’s one thing to see an image of a person online, but it’s completely different to meet them in person.
There was a Whitman statue on campus that everyone stopped to look at on the way to the campus center to lounge, talk about our experience and wait for pizza.
The lounge in the Camden Campus Center
Everyone I talked with agreed that the project and the various types of work that went into it were completely new and challenging experiences. Personally that surprised me since most of the students were english majors and graduating ones at that. However challenging the class was, everyone’s opinion of the course was the same. The Looking for Whitman project was something that made the college experience unique not only for the students, but for the professors as well. The mixing of technology – blogging, tweeting and making use of social networking- with classic poetry made for a class that produced work as original and quirky as Whitman himself.
A perfect example of that is Sam P’s final video project ‘In search of Wendell Slickman’ which mixed the life of Elvis Presley with Walt Whitman’s which as unlikely as the idea sounds, works perfectly.
We watched Sam’s project along with the presentation of a few others over pizza before hopping on the bus to take a tour of Whitman’s final home at 328 Mickle Street.
No cameras were allowed inside the house, but everything in it was photo worthy. Chairs that Whitman sat in, the stove he cooked on, the stairs he walked up and the bed he slept in – we got to see it all and experience Whitman in a way you can’t get just by reading his work. I couldn’t get any pictures of inside, but I got plenty of photos outside the house and of his garden.
From Whitman's back yard into the light
The trip didn’t end here. After visiting Whitman’s home we went to the only other place in Camden where we could feel a physical connection to him – his grave.
Unfortunately the Cemetery was closed, but that didn’t stop us from getting in to see Whitman. A conveniently placed and obviously well used hole in the fence allowed us to get to the final resting place of the great writer and bring some closure to the semester. The area in which Whitman and his family are interred is absolutely beautiful.
It was an emotional moment for many of the students as we took turns reading the last few lines of Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’. Reading one of Whitman’s greatest works in a place where he could be truly felt brought some closure to what has been the most challenging and rewarding project I’ve ever participated in. The Looking for Whitman project was a long journey that led many a student in frustrating circles, searching for some link to Whitman to make his presence more tangible than just some old writer remembered only through his books and honestly I don’t think anyone could phrase it better than Whitman himself:
Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.
“All goes onward and outward . . . . and nothing collapses”
– Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)
Last week’s student conference in Camden brought “Looking for Whitman” to a rousing, poignant close. Four months after the classes involved in the project had ended, students from the University of Mary Washington, Rutgers-Camden, and City Tech gathered together to share their experiences and to meet one another in person. Understandably, students from the University of Novi Sad were not able to make the trip across the Atlantic Ocean to be with us in person.
There was something special about this day that reflected the entire spirit of the project. It was fed, no doubt, by the amazing cadre of students from UMW who boarded a bus at 6am on a Saturday morning to take a five-hour bus ride up to Camden for a conference related to a class that they had taken in the previous semester. Led by faculty members who had devoted intense amounts of energy to the project, these students arrived at Camden at a fever pitch. They weren’t there for a conference; they were there for a revival.
What intensity these students brought with them!! They came into the room wearing Whitmanic beards, clutching their texts, brimming with excitement. And that excitement bolstered us throughout the day.
UMW students arrive in Camden festooned with Whitman beards, t-shirts, and shoes.
We knew we were very lucky to have this group with us. It can be difficult — particularly at commuter campuses like City Tech and Rutgers — to round up students four months after a class has ended, let along to convince them to take a two-hour trip from NYC or a five-hour trip from Virginia for a student conference–especially at the end of the semester, with finals and senior thesis projects looming. I know that many students wanted to attend but couldn’t because of work or family obligations. Many Rutgers graduate students couldn’t because of concurrently scheduled comprehensive exams.
UMW students felt right at home on the RU campus; here are Sam and Brendan posing with a statue of Walt:
Sam P. and Brendan B. pose with Walt himself.
A Generative Conference
Early on, we decided that this conference would not be presentational, but generative. We wanted the conference to be an active event that embodied the pedagogical imperatives of the project as a whole: students would not just lecture about the work they had done during the Fall 2009 semester, but would also create new work to accompany it. To this end, we handed out FlipCams to all students there and encouraged them to take footage of the day. In the coming days and weeks, I look forward to seeing the posts that will come out of that footage.
Some of the highlights of the day included:
– Small group discussions in which students and faculty members shared their experiences in the project and discussed the Whitman they had found in their project location.
– A viewing, over lunch, of several videos created during the course of the project. These included:
Two Videos from Novi Sad
We watched two videos from students at the University of Novi Sad that deserve special mention. As Professor Karbiener noted, many Whitman poems have not yet been translated into Serbian. In her class, Prof. Karbiener chose to concentrate on the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass, which contains some of Whitman’s most sexual poems. This was a brave choice, given Whitman’s sexuality and a Serbian culture that is not always understanding of gay rights.
Even braver and more inspiring, Prof. Karbiener’s students chose to translate some of Whitman’s most openly sexual verse into Serbian for the first time. Here are two deeply moving films depicting readings and interpretations of those verses:
This film from Indira at the University of Novi Sad feels like a mashup of Godard, neorealist Italian film, and Whitman. It’s a stunning piece of work that gets to the heart of Whitman’s democratic vision by putting his most open words in the mouths of ordinary Serbian citizens as they go about their daily lives.
A rollicking twenty-minute rock ‘n roll mockumentary by Sam P. of UMW about a figure named “Wendall Slickman,” a hybrid figure of Walt Whitman and Elvis Presley
Virginia S. of UMW created this beautiful cinepoem marked by a moving reading of Leaves of Grass playing over video footage of traveled roads, sweeping waves, and setting suns.
To be sure, these videos are just a sample of the amazing student work completed during the Fall 2009 semester. In the coming weeks and months, the Looking for Whitman team will continue to unearth and organize riches from the project. Stay tuned, and thanks so much to all students involved in the project for their good work!
A Trip to Mickle Street
At mid-afternoon, we hopped on a bus and rode a few blocks to visit Whitman’s House on Mickle Street — the only house he ever owned, and the house in which he spent the last eight years of his life. (During the course of our own project, Prof. Hoffman’s class wrote scripts for the Visitor’s Center that will soon be built at the site).
Students gather in the backyard of the Whitman house after a tour.
I’ll let the students who were visiting the house for the first time speak about this experience, but I’ll just say that it was wonderful to observe the awe with which these students approached the house.
Many thanks to Leo Blake, curator of the House, and his volunteer staff for a wonderful tour.
Whitman’s Tomb at Harleigh Cemetery
After our tour of the house, we headed over to Whitman’s gravesite. We arrived to find the front gates shut and locked, even though we arrived a few minutes before closing time. While we tried to figure out what to do, I walked around the the cemetery looking for someone to talk to. Nearby, I found a section of the wrought-iron fence that had been bent open. After I went through, hoping to talk to a representative of the cemetery, I turned to find students and faculty from the project following me through the hole in the fence!
Entrance to the Harleigh cemetery. Note the closed gate.
Finding no one around, we walked down the road a bit until we arrived at the tomb that Whitman had designed for himself and his family members:
Students and faculty members gather in front of Whitman's tomb. Thanks to Claire Fontaine for the shot.
And then, we read together the closing lines of Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” (video to follow). It was a fitting and beautiful way to end our time together.
The Smallest Sprout Shows There is Really No Death
Onward and outward. The project is drawing to a close, of sorts, but I have the sense that it will never end for many of us. Like one of the elastic, limber, ellipsis-trailing lines of Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass, Looking for Whitman will continue to fling its likeness outward; and those of us who were a part of it, or who watched it from afar, will continue to draw from it as we find it under our bootsoles, filtering and fibering the soil in which we grow.
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks to those who supported this project, including:
I am also grateful to the colleges represented in this project for the generous support and encouragement that they have given to the participants. In particular, I would like to thank the following people for their support of this project:
Dr. Bonne August, Provost and Vice President, New York City College of
Technology, CUNY
Barbara Burke, Patty Barba, Eleanor Bergonzo, Yasemin Jones from the Grants Office of the New York City College of Technology, CUNY.
Dr. Teresa A. Kennedy, Professor and Chair, Department of English,
Linguistics, and Communication, University of Mary Washington
Dr. Nina Mikhalevsky, Acting Provost and Vice President for Strategy and
Policy, Professor of Philosophy, University of Mary Washington
Dr. Michael A. Palis, Interim Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Graduate
School, Rutgers University-Camden
This project would not have been successful without the efforts of its deeply committed faculty members and staff. For their enthusiasm, excitement, energy, and expertise, I would like to thank:
I found whitman in times square, down in the subway system, the arteries of new york. For sure Whitman would have found much to write about in the underground city we call the subway system.
The semester is coming to a close and what’s so funny is that I saw myself doing exactly what I’m doing right now; trying to tie up all my lose ends with perfect knots. It’s been great taking a good look at Walt Whitmans’ life, accomplishments, dwellings and businesses. I never thought that I would be looking into someones life in such detail, yet I feel like we barely touched the surface. Walt Whitmans life was full of many experiences that I may never have to experience myself. But he had no regrets. He lived his life as he saw fit, shouting, mourning, smiling, talking, helping and experienceing to the fullest.
“I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirt to vindicate itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by
after all.
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
and if each and all be aware I sit content.
Thank-you Professor Gold for opening up the world of Walt Whitman to us. It was different, and made you think about life not just from my own perspective but from that of another. Research is hard work and dedication, I did not know how much it took to accomplish a task such as this. Until now, I thought a few books could tell you quite a bit. The books do tell, but researching further put the pieces together much more efficiently. I think I see Walt Whitman everywhere now, especially in Brooklyn. Thanks again Professor, the class was well worth the effort and beneifical to students moving on to higher degrees. And Thank-you to Clair Fontaine for all her technical support and advice on blogging, it was very helpful. I look forward to blogs in the future. Keep your eyes open!!!!!!!!!!!!
Unfortunately the Cemetery was closed, but that didn’t stop us from getting in to see Whitman. A conveniently placed and obviously well used hole in the fence allowed us to get to the final resting place of the great writer and bring some closure to the semester. The area in which Whitman and his family are interred is absolutely beautiful.
