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Go to Pfaff's!

The Move to 9 West 24th Street

Charles Pfaff continued to operate his restaurant at 653 Broadway for four more years. Pfaff, Sr. retained the place, in other words, for the entire time that his son was at Nazareth Hall. But by 1875, Charles Pfaff, Jr., had seemingly finished his classes at Nazareth and headed home to New York City. Later that same year, Pfaff, Jr. may have taken additional courses at

Packard’s Business College that would have prepared him for an entry-level position as a clerk and for advancement within whatever business he chose to enter.1 It is easy to see how Silas Sadler Packard’s (S. S. Packard) business college would have appealed to both Charles Pfaff, Jr. and his father. Packard’s was popular among students from Germany and England. The college was located nearby at 805 Broadway, and its curriculum included courses such as “Business Customs and Habits,” and “Correspondence” in addition to optional foreign language classes in French and/or German.2 Pfaff, Sr. certainly might have encouraged his son in this course of study given that he himself was well respected for his knowledge of the restaurant business. An entry for “Pfaff, Charles . . . New York” appears in Packard’s catalogue for 1876, and provided this is Pfaff, Jr., it indicates that he would have been in daily attendance at the school in 1875.3 It is worth noting that a Robert Zimmermann from New York, possibly the young clerk who resided in the Pfaff household on the 1870 census, was also taking courses at Packard’s at the same time as Charles Pfaff, which seems to offer evidence that the latter was indeed the son of the restaurant owner.4

In February 1876, likely after the younger Pfaff, then approximately nineteen years old, had completed or simply ended his studies at Packard’s, a notice appeared in the New York Herald, stating “Wanted—BY A YOUNG MAN, A GRADUATE OF the Moravian School of Nazareth, Pa., a situation in a first class mercantile house; salary no object. Address C. Pfaff, 653 Broadway.”

Four years later, on the 1880 census, the young man’s profession was recorded as “clerk,” which suggests that, at least by that time, Pfaff Jr., had obtained a position that was presumably outside his father’s restaurant, but within which he would utilize his business training.5 In the intervening years, however, Pfaff, Jr. assisted his father with the family’s restaurant. With a son ready to enter a business career of his own, Charles Pfaff, Sr. may have seen this as an ideal opportunity to rent a space that would make it possible for him to expand the family business such that, as I will show later, he was not simply concerned with food and drinks, but also with the establishment of a hotel. According to the New York Tribune, Charles Pfaff opened this new place “in connection with his son.”6 The Goulding’s New York City Directory for the year ending May 1, 1878, reveals that there is a “Charles Pfaff” working as a “cook” and living in a house at 176 W. 30th Street. Also living in this same residence is a “Robert Zimmerman,” who is employed as a “bartender.”7 It seems quite likely that this is Charles Pfaff, Jr., as well as the same Robert Zimmerman who appeared in the Pfaffs’ home in the 1870 census, who studied at Packard’s Business College, and who would return to Pfaff, Sr.’s home on W. 25th Street by 1880.8

In May of 1876, therefore, with the help of his son and possibly also Robert Zimmerman, Pfaff’s restaurant and saloon moved for the final time to a building Pfaff had rented, located at 9 W. 24th Street, opposite the Madison Square Theater and the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Charles Pfaff the elder then became, as Rufus Rockwell Wilson put it in the Elmira Telegram, “the presiding genius of a little beer shop on Twenty-fourth street almost within a stone’s throw of the Hoffman house”9 A notice in the May 12, 1876, issue of the Courrier des Etats-Unis announces Pfaff’s move: “L’établissement sera transféré, a partir du ler Mai, au n 9, Ouest 24me rue, près de Broadway” [trans. “The establishment will be transferred from May Day [the first of May] to No. 9 W. 24th Street near Broadway”] (See Figure 11, Appendix A).10 Another removal notice suggests a slightly later opening date for Pfaff’s last restaurant. On May 7, 1876, the New York Herald published a notice that declared, “REMOVAL—PFAFF’S RESTAURANT, FORMERLY AT 685, 647, and 653 Broadway, will open in a few days in the spacious building No. 9 West 24th st., near Broadway.”11 This time the notice recorded not only the new address, but also the three earlier locations, and in doing so, Pfaff ensured that any customer who had visited one of these previous establishments would now know where to find the familiar proprietor and his French and German fare. However, Pfaff’s new

Figure 11: Transfer notice for Pfaff's in French

restaurant would prove to be a very different kind of business than any of the cellars he operated on Broadway over the previous two decades since it was to become both a restaurant and hotel, offering rooms to gentlemen.

Although Pfaff’s 9 W. 24th Street (Image shows 24th Street entrance) restaurant, or as it would later be dubbed, “Pfaff’s Hotel,” looked ostensibly like a lager beer saloon when customers entered on the lower level, the building had multiple floors, several of which were utilized by Pfaff and his patrons.12 Above the saloon was a large dining room, and in the upper stories, there were furnished apartments that the proprietor rented to overnight guests.13 Besides the additional guest rooms, at least one of the larger rooms on the upper floors of Pfaff’s had a “nicely furnished parlor floor” that the proprietor allowed political and social clubs to rent when they wished to hold celebrations or events at the restaurant.

Newspapers across the United States noticed how Pfaff’s had changed from its origins in a tiny cellar to a more upscale hotel and restaurant at its new location. A writer for the Galveston Daily News explained, “His [Pfaff’s] establishment is not a dingy cellar, as of yore, but a somewhat fashionable restaurant above ground.”15 In other words, Pfaff’s had moved “uptown to respectability.”16 As the Chicago Tribune put it best in 1881, the former beer cellar was “not a bit like . . . the pretentious Hotel Pfaff of today.”17 However, the writer also admitted, that Pfaff still “gripp[ed] the beer-faucet as proudly as if it were the helm of the Ship of State” even though “he had grown more dignified and abdominal.”18 One of the most noticeable changes to the former saloon was the sign out front welcoming patrons to Pfaff’s. At 647 Broadway, the sign read only “Pfaff” and “Restauration.”19 But in the 1880s Pfaff acquired a “gilded and eminently aristocratic-looking signboard,” and he had “a new lease on life, the ownership of a brown-stone front, and the possession of altogether impressive and high-toned surroundings.”20 In addition to more space and a fancy signboard, Pfaff also had a sanitation system installed at the restaurant and hotel: he used the “Germicide Preventative System, from Germicide Co.”21 The name of Pfaff’s restaurant appeared in an advertisement listing known users of this “apparatus which supplies a constant flow of chloride zinc through the closets to the sewer” and “purifies the air of the closets,” thereby ensuring that this new place was far more sanitary than the not so-spic-and-span cellar at 647 Broadway.22

It is certain that Pfaff was happy with his new location, but the multi-floored establishment could never have the same atmosphere as the cellar vault on Broadway where the “Princes of Bohemia nightly assembled to quaff the seductive lager, while the very

cobwebs were shaken by peals of merry laughter inspired by jovial jest, epigrammatic wit, and sparkling repartee.”23 Even though Pfaff continued to target French and German speakers with his advertising, as I will discuss later, the clientele were no longer American Bohemians. In fact, “Pfaff’s patronage was decidedly different,” so much so that even Pfaff himself recognized that “his ‘cellar’ friends had gradually disappeared and he had . . . lived long enough to find genuine Bohemianism a thing of the past.”24 After all, quite a few of the members of the American Bohemian group died before Pfaff moved his business to 9 W. 24th Street in 1876. Fitz James O’Brien succumbed to his Civil War injuries in 1862, and the dramatic critic Ned Wilkins and the poet George Arnold, who had nearly come to blows with Whitman at Pfaff’s, both died in the 1860s. In the two years before Pfaff’s opened what would be his last restaurant, American Bohemia lost both its King and its Queen. In 1874 Ada Clare passed away after contracting rabies as a result of being bitten on the nose by a friend’s dog.25 In 1875, Henry Clapp passed away; as Whitman put it, “Poor fellow, he died in the gutter—drink—drink took him down, down.”26 Pfaff likely mourned the loss of Clapp; by this time, the bar owner had been giving Clapp money and/or food for years in part due to the publicity and the customers that Clapp had brought to Pfaff’s places over the years.27

Of the American Bohemians that remained when Charles Pfaff was moving into his new brownstone front and, therefore, closer to “respectability,” most of them had, according to Rufus Rockwell Wilson, “outlived their former irregular and reckless habits.” T. B. Aldrich, for example, became the “serious-minded” editor for the Atlantic Monthly, and William Winter had become “discriminating and scholarly.”28 Edmund Clarence Stedmund, a journalist and literary critic took up a career in the banking industry.29 According to a writer for the comic paper titled The Funniest of Awl & the Phunnyest Sort of Phun, this

transition to respectability had happened for some of the Bohemians as early as 1864: “Some of the leading Bohemians it was understood got married, and became ‘regular’ critics, others bought a house, and a few acquired the absurd habit of paying their tailors’ and washerwomen’s bills.”30 Here, the author is pointing to the fact that some of the former American Bohemians became decidedly more mainstream than radical following their time at Pfaff’s even as s/he is also having a laugh at the American Bohemians’ attempt to trade in their eccentric dress for more sophisticated, tailored clothing and, arguably, proper comportment to accompany those new looks. The author went on to suggest that these changes in the former American Bohemians’ appearance and behavior might have been among the reasons that the Bohemian coterie had dissolved in the first place: “This last proceeding [the paying of tailors and washerwomen], so entirely at war with the instincts and habits of the class to which they were supposed to belong, broke up the organization.” In effect, with many members of the former group either no longer alive and those that were in careers and lives that seemed far removed from their Bohemian past, it is no wonder that Pfaff felt the loss of his former clientele deeply even as he was marketing the restaurant to a clientele that would have been much closer to the serious writers and businessmen that some of Clapp’s coterie had become than to the young Bohemians they had once been. Elihu Vedder, however, who had known Charles Pfaff for years, could see that the owner missed his basement vault and its frequent inhabitants: “I really believe Pfaff himself loved the Boys . . . I saw him in his new place and asked him about it . . . but then he said, ‘It isn’t the same thing; dere’s no more poys [boys] left enny more.”31

Although all the members of the American Bohemian coterie would never gather at Pfaff’s new establishment, Pfaff was reunited with a former patron of 647 Broadway when

Walt Whitman paid him a visit on August 16, 1881. The poet took the railroad and the eight o’clock stage, a journey of some ten miles, in order to arrive in time for what he described as “an excellent breakfast” at Pfaff’s restaurant.32 Upon seeing Whitman, Pfaff immediately welcomed him and opened a “big fat bottle of the best wine in the cellar” so the two old friends could, as Whitman put it, “talk about ante-bellum times, ’59 and ’60, and the jovial suppers at his then Broadway place.” Reminiscing with Pfaff about the American Bohemians, Whitman recalled, “Ah, the friends and names and frequenters, those times, that place. Most are dead—Ada Clare, Wilkins, Daisy Sheppard, O’Brien, Henry Clapp, Stanley, Mullin, Wood, Brougham, Arnold—all gone.”33 As Whitman lists the names of their friends who have passed away, it becomes painfully clear that the poet and the bar owner are fast becoming the only remaining members of the group who know what it was like to see and experience so many Bohemian writers and artists gathered in Pfaff’s most famous Broadway cellar. Sitting across from each other at a small table, the poet and Pfaff honored the memory of their friends “in a style they [the American Bohemians] would have themselves fully confirm’d, namely big brimming, fill’d-up champagne-glasses, drain’d in abstracted silence, very leisurely, to the last drop.” It was this meeting with Pfaff—over some bottles the restaurant owner had likely saved for just such an occasion—that prompted Whitman to declare

Comic Monthly of Wilkins, O'Brien, Arnold, Mullins, and Eytinge

that Pfaff was the “best selector of champagne in America.”34 In spite of the reunion and the chance to discuss old times with Pfaff, Whitman was never a regular at Pfaff’s 24th Street restaurant. Thus, Pfaff may have come to consider Whitman as one of the “Boys” that he missed.

There were certainly fewer “Boys” at the 24th street hotel, but a few of Pfaff’s former customers did follow him to the new location, and James Ford observed, “a dozen old beggars and pensioners, whom he [Pfaff] had helped for years,” (just as he had done for Henry Clapp) continued to patronize the establishment.35 There was also at least one “coterie of gay old chaps” that consisted of “twelve jolly old sports” who gathered at “Bohemian Pfaff’s place” every New Year’s Eve. Even though American Bohemia had dissolved many years earlier, Pfaff’s reputation and his business, for better or for worse, were still associated with Bohemianism at least in the eyes of some of his customers and in the press. This group of “old chaps” established their own yearly ritual at Pfaff’s. As a joke, one of the members divided a dollar bill into twelve pieces, keeping one for himself and “dividing eleven of them among his comrades.”36 From that time on, each New Year’s Day they returned to Pfaff’s place with the understanding that “at the appointed hour on the first day of the year the jolly old cronies [would] meet and crack jokes and bottles as they put that old dollar bill together.” The absence of a piece of the dollar would indicate to the rest of the group that its owner had passed away. By 1882, the first piece went missing, and according to the writer of the article, at least one more was gone when he had last seen this group, which was just before Pfaff went out of business.

Pfaff’s may have appealed to “jolly old sports,” but his advertising in English, French, and German suggests that the hotel and restaurant still sought to maintain or to rekindle that international ambiance Pfaff had succeeded in establishing on Broadway in the late 1850s. However, Pfaff’s Hotel may have aimed to appeal to gentlemen on business in New York and/or to middle and upper class European travelers rather than recent immigrants or laborers like his early restaurants. Some of the hotel’s offerings are also reminiscent of those advertised by the Stevens House Hotel that Pfaff may or may not have been associated with when he first arrived in New York City. For example, in the restaurant in 1877, Pfaff provided a Table d’Hote for $1 from 5PM to 8PM, while breakfast was priced at 50 cents and served from 7 AM to 12 PM.37 By 1879, the hours of the Table d’Hote were 6-8PM and the $1 price now included 1⁄2 bottle of wine.38 Pfaff also retained his reputation for being a wine expert since Cook’s Excursionist and Home and Foreign Tourist Advertiser boasted to its readership that the restaurant had “one of the best wine cellars in the city.”39 Pfaff also seems to have maintained a steady commitment to the aforementioned prices throughout the late 1870s since, as previously noted, he had built his reputation on affordable food and drink.

Pfaff placed advertisements for the restaurant and hotel in both French and German language publications in the late 1870s. In 1877, for example, in a French directory to New York City, Pfaff dubbed his place a “GRAND RESTAURANT FRANCAIS” or a “great French Restaurant.”40 He also promised an “a la Carte” menu from 7AM until 8PM along with a well-served table, and liquors of the first quality.41 In that same year, in a German language version of Puck magazine, Pfaff again offered breakfast for fifty cents, but here, he also makes mention of the hotel part of his business, offering “Möblirte Zimmer zu vermiethen” or “Furnished rooms to let” (See

Figure 12: Advertisement for Pfaff's in German

Figure 12, Appendix A).42 He had placed a similar advertisement for “Appartements Meubles A Louer”— also referring to the furnished rooms available for rent in his establishment—in the Courrier des Etats-Unis as early as October 4, 1876.43 These rooms on the floors above the restaurant, however, were available exclusively to gentlemen boarders, according to the New York Evening Express.44 The rooms were described in a New York Herald posting under the headline “Boarders Wanted” as “handsomely furnished” and were available to men who wanted to rent them either with or without board.45 Although it would be difficult to determine how much Pfaff profited from renting out the upstairs rooms in the W. 24th Street building, the aspect of the hotel that attracted the most customers was still Pfaff’s beer and wines, or the downstairs bar-room.

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The Move to 9 West 24th Street

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