Silence

Alphabet City

"What can New York—noisy, roaring, rumbling, tumbling, bustling, stormy, turbulent New York—have to do with silence? Amid the universal clatter, the incessant din of business, the all-swallowing vortex of the great money whirlpool, the strife and the warfare, and the fever and the trembling— who has any, even distant, idea of the profound repose, the hushed lethargy of silence?"
Walt Whitman, The Journalism: 1834-1846

Manahatta

East River

"More and more, too, the old name absorbs into me — MANNA-HATTA, "the place encircled by many swift tides and sparkling waters." How fit a name for America's great democratic island city! The word itself, how beautiful! how aboriginal!  how it seems to rise with tall spires, glistening in sunshine, with such New World atmosphere, vista and action!"
Walt Whitman, Walt Whitman: Complete Prose Works 

Extravagant City

World Financial Center Plaza

"City of wharves and stores — city of tall facades of marble and iron! Proud and passionate city — mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!"
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

The Most Effective Medicine

Roosevelt Island

"I find in this visit to New York, and the daily contact and rapport with its myriad people, on the scale of the oceans and tides, the best, most effective medicine my soul has yet partaken — the grandest physical habitat and surroundings of land the globe affords."
Walt Whitman, Specimen Days & Collect

Walks and Joys

Flushing Meadows-Corona Park

"City of orgies, walks, and joys."

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass