First opened in a storefront on Nassau and Bridge streets in 1900, the predecessor to Walt Whitman branch, formerly called “City Park Branch”, moved into the ground floor of a tenement house. In 1908, the present-day Classical Revival Carnegie library opened. The branch had a significant collection on naval architecture and science for workers at the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard. Renamed Walt Whitman Branch in 1943 on the 125th anniversary of the Brooklyn poet’s birth, the library underwent a major renovation in 1958 and upgrades in 1998.
