“St. Edwards Street, at the northeast corner of Auburn Place, showing the City Park branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. In the background is Cumberland Hospital; on the left Public School No. 67, 1940.”

The predecessor to Walt Whitman Library (called the City Park Branch before 1943) opened in a storefront on Nassau and Bridge Streets in 1900. Eight years later, a beautiful new library, funded by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, built in the Classical Revival style, and designed by Rudolph L. Daus, opened on St. Edwards Street in Fort Greene. The library was named for Whitman on the125th anniversary of his birth in 1943.