One hundred fifty years ago, Walter Whitman, 36 years old, set the type for the first edition of “Leaves of Grass” at a print shop stood at the corner of Fulton and Cranberry Streets. The building fell to the urban-renewal wrecking-ball in 1964, replaced by the Whitman Close apartments.

Born in 1819 on a Long Island farm near Hempstead, at 4 he moved with his family to the Village of Brooklyn. The village was the most populous district within the Town of Brooklyn, itself but one of six towns composing Kings County, or today’s Brooklyn Borough. The village had a population of some 12,000 in 1823. By the time Whitman left Brooklyn, in 1861, the town had been chartered as a city, and had annexed the Town of Bushwick to form the third largest city in the United States, with some 280,000 people. Whitman chronicled this phenomenal growth as journalist, and as poet.

Yet if we wish to take the measure of Whitman’s New York, we must cross the river. Whitman loved to cross by steam ferry from the Fulton Street pier. In the fence around the pier today, you may read words from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” which Whitman used in the second of the nine editions of “Leaves of Grass,” his ever-mutating magnum opus.

Whitman reveled in the street life of 1850s Manhattan – “City of orgies, walks and joys,” he called it. Melville had written: “I would to God Shakespeare had lived later & promenaded in Broadway.” Whitman promenaded in Broadway. His destination typically was Pfaff’s. In 1910, the New York Times ran a lengthy lament of an article titled “The Passing of the Literary Haunts of New York.” The anonymous author wrote: “Of all the resorts to which the names of our authors have given interest there has been none so truly Bohemian as Pfaff’s famous old Broadway Restaurant and Beer Cellar.”

Pfaff’s stood on the west side of Broadway, roughly opposite Bleecker Street. Pfaff’s opened, it is believed, in 1855; around 1870 the present building at 653 Broadway replaced the building that had housed the rathskeller. Stand on the sidewalk in front, however, and you stand over Pfaff’s basement alcove that extended beneath the Broadway pavement. At a table in this alcove met the group of writers of whom Whitman was the informal leader. He wrote:

The vault at Pfaff’s where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse,
While on the walk immediately overhead past the myriad feet of Broadway.

These Pfaff’s writers were New York’s earliest self-styled “Bohemians,” as interested in sartorial affectation and unconventional manners as in producing literature. Whitman is the only one still widely read, with the likes of Artemus Ward, Henry Clapp, and Fitz-James O’Brien disappearing into the footnotes.

The most intriguing of Pfaff’s regulars were two women, both actresses, poets, and proselytizers for what was quaintly called “free love.” Ada Clare bore the illegitimate son of composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (a sometime Pfaff’s regular) and may have had amorous relations with Whitman himself. The other woman, Adah Isaacs Menken, figures in literary history in a curious way having nothing to do with her writings. When the English poet Algernon Swinburne moved into the home of his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the latter despaired of the former’s flagrant homosexuality. Rossetti schemed – in a way worthy of a bad comic movie of today – to have Ms. Menken seduce Swinburne, so as to “convert” him. Accounts vary, but it appears she may have seduced him, though not so as permanently to alter his ways. It appears that if Ada Clare had relations with Whitman, the outcome was the same.

How much of Whitman’s Broadway remains to be seen by today’s promenader?

Pfaff’s is gone. One building across from Pfaff’s still stands from those days, and would have been noted by Whitman, who had an eye for architectural detail. This is 620 Broadway, a handsome cast-iron-fronted edifice. Built in 1858-59, its construction noises had to have penetrated to the table in Pfaff’s alcove.

At the northeast corner of Broadway and Prince Street once stood Niblo’s Garden, one of Manhattan’s “pleasure gardens” – park-like settings for amusements, repast, and theatrical entertainments. Niblo’s opened in 1849 and was well known to Whitman, who loved the theater, whether Shakespeare or a minstrel show. In 1852, the Metropolitan Hotel rose at that corner, one among several hotels to rise when the city hosted thousands of visitors to the “Crystal Palace” exhibition at Reservoir Square (today’s Bryant Park) in 1853. (Whitman himself attended frequently.) A barely visible remnant of these hotels is a portion of the St. Nicholas – the most famous of them all – on the west side of Broadway, at 521 and 523 between Spring and Broome. It originally stretched from 507 to 527.

In his autobiographical “Specimen Days,” Whitman wrote of walking in the 1840s past the home of America’s richest man, John Jacob Astor. Astor’s home was on the site of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, on the west side of Broadway between Houston and Prince. Whitman stood in awe as he saw old Astor carried, like an exotic potentate, in a chair from his home to a curbside carriage.

Broadway was the center of luxury retail. Banana Republic now occupies 550 Broadway on the east side, where in the same building in Whitman’s day one found a jeweler called Tiffany’s. At the northeast corner of Broadway and Broome stands the former Haughwout Store, a high-end dealer in glassware and china. This is one of the most perfect cast-iron-fronted buildings in New York. It opened in 1857 and was familiar to Whitman for its steam-driven passenger elevator – the first in any commercial building in the world.

Farther down Broadway, at Franklin Street, are two survivors from Whitman’s era. On the northwest corner is a distinctive edifice that housed Taylor’s, a restaurant catering to an exclusively female clientele and said to have perhaps been the most popular restaurant in the United States in the 1850s. One building in from the southwest corner is a fine stone building in the top three floors of which New York’s most famous photographer Mathew Brady kept his studio and gallery in these days. Whitman found photography fascinating and went to see the pictures in Brady’s gallery.

Whitman volunteered at New York Hospital, which at the time stood on Broadway between Thomas and Duane. The lone reminder of the hospital on that site is the unexpected alleyway, Trimble Place, just west of Broadway from Thomas to Duane. Named for a hospital director, this was a carriageway for ambulances.

At the southeast corner of Broadway and Reade stands a handsome building that opened in 1846 as the A.T. Stewart Store, eventually growing south to Chambers. This was the most renowned “dry goods” store in America. Young Henry James went shopping there with his aunt in the early fifties. Who knows? James and Whitman may have crossed paths at this corner, or in the store.

Finally, City Hall is where in 1865 Lincoln’s body lay in state before his funeral cortege proceeded north on Broadway. Whitman had wished to be in New York for this, but failed to make it in time. One of Whitman’s most moving poems is his Lincoln elegy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

Shakespeare never promenaded in Broadway. But Lincoln and Whitman did. And Broadway was otherwise never so honored.

Mr. Morrone’s Abroad in New York column appears each Monday. He can be reached at fmorrone@nysun.com.