It was in 1855, near Cadman Plaza Park, that Walt Whitman wrote his great paean to America’s people and its landscapes, Leaves of Grass. The world it celebrated was one in which small barges on Newtown Creek carried fresh produce from Long Island and when Jamaica Bay was known the world over for its oysters and fishing. The world in which the poem was first published seemed illimitable—it promised so much because it gave so much.