He came to New York and gathered artists, poets, actors, and interesting types together to meet and discourse and be fabulous.
But after France, he was done with social reform. He had been a noted New England antislavery and temperance advocate. The “King of Bohemia” at Pfaff’s was Henry Clapp, Jr., who had gone to France in 1850. As transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott remembered, Whitman ‘lived to make poems, and for nothing else in particular.’ And at night, beneath his beloved streets, he went to Pfaff’s.
Some days, he’d ride up and down Broadway, chatting with the omnibus drivers and jostling with fruit sellers. But in New York, with its dirty streets and jostling crowds, they also found beauty. The Pfaff’s group loved the idea of Paris. They accepted poverty as a matter of course. Bohemians were lovers of art, and drink, and witty conversation, and rejected mainstream paths to success and fulfillment. The crowd that gathered at Pfaff’s was inspired by the bohemian literary culture of Paris’s Latin Quarter, which Henri Murger had chronicled in his 1851 collection of stories Scènes de la Vie de Bohême. He is now a giant of the American canon, but as his contemporary William Dean Howells remembered, his celebrity in the 19 th century was often “largely the infamy resulting from what many considered to be his obscene writings.” The years before the Civil War were a decadent period where Whitman played the bon vivant, finding friends and lovers among the New York counterculture. Whitman became a regular at Pfaff’s after getting fired from the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1859. Whitman called Charlie Pfaff “a generous German restaurateur, silent, stout, jolly, and I should say the best selector of champagne in America.” Light filtered into the depths through glassed over vaults in the sidewalk. The hall had long communal tables, dim lighting, and was filled with smoke. Patrons entered by traveling down a set of rickety stairs. The crowd that gathered at Pfaff’s helped make New York into the literary, publishing, and theatrical center it has been ever since.Ĭharles Pfaff’s cave-like basement beer hall was modeled on the German rathskellers (below street level drinking establishments) that were popular in Europe. Prior to Whitman, Boston-the headquarters of Thoreau, Emerson, and Alcott -was the literary center of the United States. As writer Allan Gurganus has said, “Pfaff’s was the Andy Warhol factory, the Studio 54, the Algonquin Round Table all rolled into one.”
From the mid-1850s to the late 1860s, Pfaff’s was the center of New York bohemia.
Though he wasn’t actually much of a drinker, Whitman for a time took nightly refuge beneath the streets of New York at Charles Pfaff’s beer cellar, an underground spot at 647 Broadway near Bleecker Street. Bruised and rejected by the mainstream literary community, he did what so many people would do – he went out and had a drink with his friends. Walt Whitman thought Leaves of Grass, his love letter to America, would heal the divided country and make people see everyday beauty around them. While on the walk immediately overhead pass the myriad feet of BroadwayĪs the dead in their graves are underfoot hiddenĪnd the living pass over them, recking not of them,īeam up-Brighten up, bright eyes of beautiful young men!
The vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse