This program is co-sponsored by the Merchant’s House Museum

Though a statue of Fitz-Greene Halleck graces the Poet’s Walk in Central Park, the nearly forty years he lived in New York City, between 1808 and 1848, were spent mostly in Greenwich Village. Halleck got his start in newspapers, earning his reputation with versified, “talk of the town”-style poems that reported on some of the hottest cultural events of his day.

A confirmed bachelor, Halleck also came into contact with some of the earliest forms of New York’s night life, theater, and sex work. This lecture will introduce audiences to this once-famous but now forgotten poet, and along the way it will trace some of the paths he walked during one of New York City’s fastest and most consequential periods of urban development.

Jordan Alexander Stein is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Fordham University