When one man's family history pointed towards an association with Walt Whitman, research efforts resulted in a new website archiving the poet's old stomping grounds. Whitman's Brooklyn looks at the borough, where Whitman moved at the age of 4, during the mid to late 1800s. Along with each image on the site is an in-depth history of the area portrayed. In an 1847 engraving of what at the time was called Washington Park, it is......

MOVIES: With another version of Hairspray hitting the big screen this summer, it seems to be a season of decades past and, of course, hair! Movies With a View brings back the musical tale of Central Park hippies, small town boys headed to Vietnam and the '60s as they show the film Hair tonight. Deejays at 6pm, Movie at Sundown // Empire Fulton State Park, Dumbo // Free It's the last night to catch Punk's......

Staten Island needs some cheerleaders every once in a while, especially after their ice cream flavor was named after their landfill. The NY Times has a piece on the borough's historian, "Brooklyn has Walt Whitman to sing praises of its 'ample hills.' Manhattan has Woody Allen to capture its outsize style and neuroses. And Staten Island? Well, Staten Island has Thomas W. Matteo for a borough historian to chronicle its glories, its goofs and, yes,......

It had been a few days since anyone had seen Haydee Soto or her children, 13 year old Valerie Rivera and 15 year old John James Bordoy at the Walt Whitman Houses in Fort Greene. A smell had been coming from the family's apartment, so neighbors and relatives asked the police to open the door, only to find a grim scene. The dead bodies of Soto, Rivera, and Bordoy, as well as Hector Viera, in......

Today is an all Brooklyn edition of the Gothamist Newsmap: a multiple murder suicide at the Walt Whitman Housing Project in Fort Greene, a bomb threat on Meserole Avenue in Brooklyn, and at fire on St. James Place in Park Slope. Most amusing Craigslist Missed Connection EVER: "I vomited in the bakery and you asked me if I was ok - m4w - 27 I answered that it must have been the tacos I......

Sergeant James Rector had just left work at a police recruiting office near the Walt Whitman Houses in Fort Greene when he saw a teenager pointing a gun execution-style at a man on the street. Rector yelled for 17 year old Eric Hines to stop and identified himself as a police officer, but Hines shot him twice. Rector, while hit in the ankle and butt, managed to shoot 11 rounds at Hines, hitting him in......

Last night Gothamist attended the 4th annual benefit for the Academy of American Poets at Alice Tully Hall and was reminded that reciting poetry aloud is really a wonderful thing. As the kick-off to National Poetry Month in April, a panel of celebrity readers including William Wegman, Mike Wallace, Dianne Weist, Alan Alda and Meryl Streep read a few examples each from a variety of American poets. Great poets like William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Plath,......

Sylka and John, Flag Makers...

NY Times Ethicist Randy Cohen announces to readers (Gothamist assumes he means all NY Times readers, though he just mentions "Book Review" readers) that he wants their suggestions to make a literary map of Manhattan, places where literary characters walked, brooded, or traipsed. Email suggestions to bookmap@nytimes.com (there are more rules and regs, like having page numbers and quotes, here), credit will be given to the first person who sends in a submission for a......

Daniel Nester, Proofreader/Editor/Poet...

Jeff Croteau, Librarian in G-Training...

While the city's Poem in Your Pocket Day is a nice cause - putting a poem in your pocket tomorrow to encouraging literacy and poetry, capping off National Poetry Month - Gothamist noted one thing about one the program's sponsors, The New York Times. The only Times article we recall about poetry (before today's about the new Queens poet laureate, Ishle Yi Park; her own website) is the one about poets dying at younger ages......