Go to Pfaff's!Main MenuAn Introduction to Charles Pfaff and His CellarChapter 1Charles Ignatius Pfaff: Arrival in New YorkChapter 2The First Pfaff’sChapter 3Henry Clapp, Jr. and the Discovery of Pfaff’sChapter 4Pfaff’s “New Wein and Lager Bier Saloon and Restauration”Chapter 5“The Best Viands, The Best Lager Beer”: Food, Drink, and Service at Pfaff’sChapter 6The American Bohemians at Pfaff’sChapter 7The End of the American Bohemian Group at Pfaff’sChapter 8Charles Pfaff’s Restaurant at 653 BroadwayChapter 9“Let’s Go To Kruyt’s”: Selling Pfaff’sChapter 10A Pfaff’s Restaurant at 696 Broadway?Chapter 11Pfaff and the Restaurant in the 1870sChapter 12The Move to 9 West 24th StreetChapter 13An Interview with Charles PfaffChapter 14The Loss of 9 W. 24th Street and the Death of Charles PfaffChapter 15Life after the Restaurant Business: Charles Pfaff, Jr., Amateur AthleteChapter 16Image GalleryParent Path of All Image GalleriesList of Note and Chapter PagesStephanie M. Blalock33854764cbea686770926ab3b9df888133f582b0
The Legacy of Pfaff’s
1media/Hans Deli.jpegmedia/Hans Deli.jpeg2024-04-21T23:51:52-04:00Audrey Clancyd587647054ec79f44cdc5558b35a3e8a8e94fbf624327Chapter 17plain2025-01-18T22:15:03-05:00Audrey Clancyd587647054ec79f44cdc5558b35a3e8a8e94fbf6Just as Charles Pfaff, Sr.’s death meant the end of his involvement with the hotel and restaurant business, the death of Charles Pfaff, Jr., marked the passing of the last surviving member of the Pfaff family in New York City. All that remains of the proprietor and his son are a series of genealogical documents and a fragmented history of their restaurants and saloons, which I have attempted to reconstruct here. The basement at 647 Broadway, where the Pfaff family lived and thrived and where the American Bohemians composed poems and drank lager beer—remained long after the Zigi Sohofather and son moved uptown. Even as late as the 1870s, some ten years after Charles Pfaff opened a new restaurant a few doors down, the American Bohemians’ former cellar retained a literary connection. By then it had become one of the “loafing place[s]” of Don Seitz, the biographer of Artemus Ward, who, as a boy, was “fascinated with books,” especially those he encountered at 647 Broadway. James Miller, a bookseller and publisher, then owned “a fine book-store” located at that familiar address, which Seitz “had the run of and where [he] spent many days of delight.”1 Miller used the basement for storing and packing books, and although Seitz was a frequent patron of Miller’s establishment, he did not realize, at the time, that this cellar had been the gathering place of the American Bohemians.2
Theodore Wolfe, reporting on the “Literary Shrines of Manhattan,” wrote that by 1919, “the recesses” of the Pfaffian basement that “once resounded with the wit and merriment of bright souls are now stored with senseless and sordid merchandise.”3 As Karen Karbiener points out, today, 647 Broadway is the home of the shoe store Zigi Soho, and the manager of the business has turned the basement into a storage space.4 The cellar’s vaults collapsed due to the stress placed on the structures by what Whitman called the “myriad crowds of Broadway” in his poem “The Two Vaults,” but even now, employees still use the original set of stairs “descending from the Broadway sidewalk.”5 Even though the vaults at 647 are no longer intact, the basement vault beneath 645 Broadway, now the address of Han's DeliHan’s Deli, still survives. This subterranean cave, which now serves as the deli’s warehouse, provides the best idea of what the space of Pfaff’s cellar might have looked like in the American Bohemians’ day.6 In 2011, there was an attempt to recreate a cellar bar “in Pfaff’s image”—at 643 Broadway; it was called The Vault at Pfaff’s, also after a line from Whitman’s “The Two Vaults.” The menus for the establishment were designed to resemble the American Bohemians newspaper, the New-York Saturday Press. The owner of the Vault at Pfaff’s installed several pieces of period furniture, and added a 150-year-old oak bar.7 As of 2014, however, the barroom has already been closed, and the space is being converted in preparation for a new establishment.8
Even though current businesses like Zigi Soho may be located above the very subterranean space in which Henry Clapp and his fellow American Bohemians drank and dined with Charles Pfaff in the antebellum years, and even though Han’s Deli operates above a cellar that gives us an idea of what Pfaff’s might have looked like, there are, at the time of this writing, no markers to detail the rich history of any of the four locations of Pfaff’s. Yet, there was a time when Pfaff’s cellar restaurant and its American Bohemian crowd attracted “all the great men of the time who visited New York.” Then, “nobody of any note, from anywhere, came to New York without hearing of it, and desiring to get there.”9 Late in his life, when Walt Whitman was reminiscing about Pfaff’s, he stated, “‘Bohemia’ comes but once in one’s life. Let’s treasure even its memories.”10 The same might be said about the memories of each of Pfaff’s restaurants and saloons; after all, it is through the writings of those who saw for themselves what Pfaff’s was like in its heyday that we can best attempt to as—they so often and so fondly put it—“Go To Pfaff’s!”
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1media/pfaff.png2024-04-21T23:55:45-04:00Audrey Clancyd587647054ec79f44cdc5558b35a3e8a8e94fbf6“GO TO PFAFF’S!”Audrey Clancy32visual_path2024-06-05T13:06:02-04:00Audrey Clancyd587647054ec79f44cdc5558b35a3e8a8e94fbf6
