Chapter 5 Notes
1. New-York Saturday Press, "Pfaff's [from the N. Y. correspondent of the Boston Saturday Express]," 2.
2. New York Herald, "New Wein and Lager Bier Saloon," Removal Notice, March 31, 1859, 8, http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html.
3. Ibid.
4. Karbiener, "Whitman at Pfaff's," 14.
5. "Pfaff's [from the N. Y. correspondent of the Boston Saturday Express]," 2.
6. Joanna Levin, Bohemia in America, 1858-1920 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 7; Daniel Cottom, International Bohemia: Scenes of Nineteenth-Century Life (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 186. The New-York Saturday Press description also seems to present Pfaff's as what Ray Oldenburg refers to as a "third place." Oldenburg writes, "The third place is a generic designation for a great variety of public places that host the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work." But the third place is not just about escaping these realms. The third place offers "experiences and relationships afforded there and nowhere else," which is, I would add, is in part why the American bohemian group became regulars at Pfaff's and why many other customers came to the cellar to meet and/or watch them. See Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts, and how they get you through the day (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1997), 16, 21.
7. "Pfaff's [from the N. Y. correspondent of the Boston Saturday Express]," 2.
8. Ibid.
9. Parry, Garrets and Pretenders, 22-23.
10. In Pioneer of Inner Space, his biography of the Bohemian writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Donald Dulchinos contends that the Bohemians also referred to themselves as "the Cave Dwellers" because they so often occupied Pfaff's cave-like vault. See Donald P. Dulchinos, Pioneer of Inner Space: The Life of Fitz Hugh Ludlow; Hasheesh Eater (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1998), 92; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 711.
11. Joseph Lewis French, "Looking Backward," The Bookman, a Review of Books and Life 63, no. 4 (June 1926), 445-450. The Mermaid was located in lower Bread Street, near the Thames. Fran C. Chalfant, Ben Jonson's London: A Jacobean Placename Dictionary (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 66. It was the meeting place of "a group of writers, politicians, lawyers, courtiers, and business men in the early seventeenth century." Adam Smyth, Introduction to A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2004), xxii. Michelle O'Callaghan argues that the societies that met at the Mermaid not only discussed politics, but they also made poetry and were "characterized by their wit and versifying." "Tavern Societies, the Inns of Court, and the Culture of Conviviality in Early Seventeenth-Century London" in A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth- Century England. Edited by Adam Smyth. (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 42. The phrase "Ben Jonson's Apollo" may refer to the "Apollo Room" of Devil Tavern, located on Fleet Street in London, where Jonson and his friends met regularly. Chalfant, Ben Johnson's London, 66.
12. During his student days, Johanne Wolfgang von Goethe frequented Auerbach's Cellar, a restaurant with a wine bar, in Leipzig, Germany. He would later set some of the scenes of Faust in Auerbach's Cellar. Dr. Charles Haeseler, who visited the cellar during his tour of Europe in 1867 writes that Auerbach's was then a "dingy old cellar, with a dank, subterranean smell, with arched ceiling and massive walls, covered interiorly with faded frescoes, illustrating the friendly intercourse between Doctor Faustus and the devil." See Kuno Fischer, Goethe's Faust. Vol. 1: Faust Literature Before Goethe (Manchester, IA: H. R. Wolcott, 1895), 133, 261.
13. Charles Taber Congdon, Reminiscences of a Journalist (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1880), 338. It is interesting to note that here Congdon also calls refers to the cellar as "Paff's."
14. Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830- 1930 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 17-18, 21.
Both the American bohemians and their French predecessors may have been attempting to adopt what they thought were aspects of "Bohemian" culture or a gypsy lifestyle. According to Joanna Levin, the term "Bohemian" dates to the "fifteenth-century, when the gypsies (erroneously thought to have migrated from the central European kingdom of Bohemia) began to settle in regions of Western Europe. See Bohemia in America, 1858-1920, 16. According to Siegel, in the 1830s, Félix Pyat described as bohemians those young artists who donned medieval costumes, wore long hair, and attempted to identify themselves with early gypsy culture, putting themselves "'outside the law, beyond the reaches of society.'" See Félix Pyat, "Les artistes," Nouveau tableau de Paris au XIXme siècle, Vol. IV (1834), 9, quoted in Jerrold Siegel, Bohemian Paris, 17.
15. Hingston, The genial showman, 146.
16. William M. Thackeray, the author of Vanity Fair (1848), patronized an oyster cellar like those Charles McKay described, when he made his own trip to New York. Artemus Ward relates that Thackeray was on Broadway, when he came across a sign that promised, "Oysters cooked here in thirty-six different ways." Thackeray is said to have entered the establishment and immediately asked for his oysters to be prepared in the thirty-six advertised ways, an order which certainly surprised the waiters and the kitchen staff. Hingston, The genial showman, 145-146. For McKay's impressions of New York's Oyster cellars, see Charles McKay, "New York as Seen by a Foreigner," Daily Evening Bulletin, March 8, 1858, 1, Karbiener, "Whitman at Pfaff's," 6.
17. McKay, "New York as Seen by a Foreigner," 1.
18. Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, Ed. Edward F. Grier, 6 Vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 2:525. Hereafter NUPM.
19. "Pfaff's [from the N. Y. correspondent of the Boston Saturday Express]," 2.
20. Charles Hemstreet, Literary New York: its landmarks and Associations (New York G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1903), 215.
21. Ibid.
22. Karbiener, "Whitman at Pfaff's," 16.
23. It is not always possible to determine which of Pfaff's restaurants and saloons is being described even if an address is given. During the years of Whitman's patronage, for instance, "Pfaff's" was located at 647 Broadway, but by 1865, "Pfaff's" had moved to a new location, at 653 Broadway, which Whitman could not have visited on a regular basis since he was then in Washington. It is possible, however, that Whitman did seek out the new beer garden when he returned to New York to visit his family. The address (653 Broadway) does appear in one of his notebooks (NUPM 1:840). In Garrets and Pretenders, Albert Parry gives the address of Pfaff's as "653 Broadway," and then states that this was the space Whitman frequented. It is difficult to determine if Parry gives an account of the 647 cellar, but gives the wrong address, or if he describes the 653 location and states, incorrectly, that Whitman and the bohemians were regulars there. Parry, Garrets and Pretenders, 21. In an effort to portray, as accurately as possible, Pfaff's at 647 Broadway, I have turned not simply to accounts with addresses (since some of these record the incorrect location for the cellar), but rather I have looked for accounts of Pfaff's that resemble Karen Karbiener's description of the vault at 645 Broadway, a nearly identical cellar that still survives next door to the Pfaff's (647 Broadway) that Whitman patronized. Furthermore, it is important to note, that some of the confusion over the address of Pfaff's occurs because the Pfaff's at 653 Broadway also had a cellar that Charles Pfaff used. It would, therefore, have been easy for patrons to confuse the locations. See Karbiener, "Whitman at Pfaff's," 16-17.
24. John J. Pullen, Comic Relief: the life and laughter of Artemus Ward, 1834-1867 (New Haven, CT: Archon Books, 1983), 36.
25. Winter, Old Friends: Being Literary Recollections of Other Days, 64; Lause, The Antebellum Crisis, 63.
26. Winter, Old Friends: Being Literary Recollections of Other Days 64; James L. Huffman, A Yankee in Meiji, Japan: The Crusading Journalist Edward H. House (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 22; Pullen, Comic Relief, 36.
27. Karen Karbiener, "Whitman at Pfaff's,"16.
28. Hingston, The genial showman, 38.
29. William Shepard Walsh, Pen Pictures of Modern Authors. Volume 2 of Literary Life (City: G. P. Putnam, 1882), 2:161; Rufus Rockwell Wilson, New York: old & new, 2:140-41.
30. Rebecca Harding Davis, "Chapter XI: The Den of the Bohemians. A Long Journey,"Peterson's Magazine 51, no. 4 (April 1867), 273.
31. Walt Whitman, "Calamus 29." Leaves of Grass (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860), 371.
32. Karbiener, "Whitman at Pfaff's," 15.
33. Eastern State Journal (White Plains, NY), "Personal Paragraphs," December 3, 1887, 7, http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html.
34. Qtd in Parry, Garrets and Pretenders, 22; Hingston, The genial showman, 149.
35. Utica Daily Observer (Utica, NY), "The Bohemians of Former Days," March 21, 1874), 3, http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html.
36. "Pfaff's [from the N. Y. correspondent of the Boston Saturday Express]," 2.
37. Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life from 1850 to 1950 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 74.
38. Bronson Alcott, The Journals of Bronson Alcott. Vol. 2. Ed. Odell Shepherd (New York: Kennikat Press, 1966), 293.
39. William Henry Boyd, Boyd's Pictorial Directory of Broadway: in which will be found an alphabetical, a business, and a numerical or street directory, giving the names of the occupants of every building on Broadway (New York: William H. Boyd: 1859).
40. Boyd's Pictorial, 44-58; Trow's New York City Directory (1859), 27.
41. Karbiener, "Whitman at Pfaff's," 15.
42. By 1872, Bleecker Street was well known as what James Dabney McCabe has termed the "headquarters of Bohemianism." In the late 1840s and early 1850s, the area north of Bleecker Street (the northern end of Broadway) and to the south near Bond Street had been among New York's wealthiest and most refined aristocratic neighborhoods. But twenty-five years later, the old mansions had been turned into boarding houses and restaurants. As McCabe puts it, "Mrs. Grundy now shivers with holy horror when she thinks it was once her home." He goes on to describe Bleecker as the home of the "long-haired, queerly dressed young man" who is an "artist" and to the young woman with the "flashy dress" and "traces of rouge on her face," who can be seen performing at the local theatres. See James Dabney McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life; or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City. A Work descriptive of the City of New York in all its Various Phases (Philadelphia: The National Publishing Co., 1872), 386-387.
43. New-York Saturday Press, "Pfaff's Restaurant and Lager Bier Saloon," Advertisement, September 10, 1859, 3. The Vault at Pfaff's. http://lehigh.edu/pfaffs. Ed. Edward Whitley and Rob Weidman; Vanity Fair, "Advertisement 1—[Pfaff's: At Pfaff's Restaurant and Lager Bier Saloon]," January 7, 1860, 31. The Vault at Pfaff's. http://lehigh.edu/pfaffs. Ed. Edward Whitley and Rob Weidman; Karbiener, "Whitman at Pfaff's," 20.
44. Vanity Fair, "Advertisement 1," 31; Vanity Fair, "Advertisement--5 [Pfaff's: At Pfaff's Restaurant and Lager Bier Saloon]," March 24, 1860, 194,
45. New York Evening Express, "Literary," February 9, 1867, 1, http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html.
46. Courrier des Etats Unis, "Café et Restaurant De Pfaff," January 21, 1862.
47. See, for example, Courrier des Etats Unis, Chs. Pfaff," June 20, 1864; Courrier des Etats Unis, "Avis. Charles Pfaff," December 13, 1865; Courrier des Etats Unis, "Charles Pfaff, Restaurant Français A La Carte," December 4, 1876.