EAGLE AND DESIDERATA, PARK SLOPE

WAY back in 2011 I walked Union Street all the way from the waterfront in Carroll Gardens to Prospect Park; I haven’t yet made my way to where Union Street continues on the other side of the park all the way out to Brownsville. New York is full of Unions — not only labor unions, but streets and squares called Union. While Manhattan’s Union Square was named in the 19th Century for the encounter of Broadway and Bowery Road (now 4th Avenue), the lengthy routes Union Avenue and Union Street in Brooklyn, Union Street and Turnpike in Queens, and Union Avenue in the Bronx are so called for an honorific for the United States of America not often used these days … the “Union.” According to Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss’ Brooklyn By Name, Union Street was named for Union Stores, long-gone waterside warehouses along Columbia Street that held imported goods.

Painted on a wall on the SE corner of 5th and Union, next to an ice cream parlor, was Max Ehrmann’s “Desiderata”. It’s much parodied and made fun of, but most of its sentiments parallel my own, and while I am not a poetry aficionado, if I have a favorite poem, it’s this one. Though it was written in the 1920s there has been confusion about its age and authorship:

Around 1959, the Rev. Frederick Kates, the rector of St. Paul’s Church in Baltimore, Maryland, used the poem in a collection of devotional materials he compiled for his congregation. (Some years earlier he had come across a copy of Desiderata.) At the top of the handout was the notation, “Old St. Paul’s Church, Baltimore A.C. 1692.” The church was founded in 1692.

As the material was handed from one friend to another, the authorship became clouded. Copies with the “Old St. Paul’s Church” notation were printed and distributed liberally in the years that followed. It is perhaps understandable that a later publisher would interpret this notation as meaning that the poem itself was found in Old St. Paul’s Church, dated 1692. This notation no doubt added to the charm and historic appeal of the poem, despite the fact that the actual language in the poem suggests a more modern origin. The poem was popular prose for the “make peace, not war” movement of the 1960s.

When Adlai Stevenson died in 1965, a guest in his home found a copy of Desiderata near his bedside and discovered that Stevenson had planned to use it in his Christmas cards. The publicity that followed gave widespread fame to the poem as well as the mistaken relationship to St. Paul’s Church.

As of 1977, the rector of St. Paul’s Church was not amused by the confusion. Having dealt with the confusion “40 times a week for 15 years,” he was sick of it.

This misinterpretation has only added to the confusion concerning whether or not the poem is in the public domain.

By the way, Desiderata is Latin for “Things to be Desired.” Fleurdelis

In 1971, a recording of “Desiderata” by talk show host Les Crane made the national top ten and won a Grammy award. The rendering on Union Street was, of course, painted over a long time ago.

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4/16/24