Writing in 1860 about his trip to Boston, Whitman said to his friend, Abby Price, "I create an immense sensation in Washington street. Everybody here is so like everybody else—and I am Walt Whitman!—Yankee curosity and cuteness, for once, is thoroughly stumped, confounded, petrified, made desperate" (pml.00011).

J. W. Black's gallery was on Washington Street, known as the "photography row" of Boston. For more information on Black, see "Notes on Whitman's Photographers"; see also Stefan Hughes, Catchers of the Light, 2012, p. 348, note 28.