40°43′36″N73°59′45″W / 40.72675°N 73.99580°W /40.72675; -73.99580
Pfaff's was a drinking establishment inManhattan,New York City, known for its literary and artistic clientele.
Opened in 1855 by Charles Ignatious Pfaff, the original Pfaff's was modeled after the GermanRathskellers that were popular in Europe at the time. Charles Pfaff's beer cellar was located onBroadway nearBleecker Street (before 1862, Pfaff's address was given as 647 Broadway; after 1865, its location was advertised as 653 Broadway) inGreenwich Village,New York City. To enter the beer cellar—which was actually a vaulted ceiling bar and restaurant—its patrons had to go down a set of stairs.
From the mid-1850s to the late 1860s, Pfaff's was the center of New York's revolutionary culture. As writerAllan Gurganus has said, "Pfaff’s was theAndy Warhol factory, theStudio 54, theAlgonquin Round Table all rolled into one."[1]
Habitués included journalist and social criticHenry Clapp, Jr.,Walt Whitman, author and actressAda Clare, poet and actressAdah Isaacs Menken, playwrightJohn Brougham, artistElihu Vedder, pianist and composerLouis Moreau Gottschalk (who also had an affair with Ada Clare), actorEdwin Booth, authorFitz Hugh Ludlow, and humoristArtemus Ward.[2] Whitman called Charlie Pfaff "a generous German restaurateur, silent, stout, jolly," as well as "the best selector of champagne in America."[3] Whitman also wrote an unfinished poem about Pfaff's called "The Two Vaults," which included the lines:
...The vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse
While on the walk immediately overhead pass the myriad feet of Broadway...
WriterFitz James O'Brien also wrote an ode to Pfaff's and to the clientele; an annotated copy of these lyrics titledAt Pfaff's was pasted byThomas Butler Gunn into his 1860 diary and can be seen atThe Vault at Pfaff's website.[4]
Clapp, considered by many the "King of Bohemia", foundedThe Saturday Press as New York's answer to theAtlantic Monthly. Started as a literary magazine,The Saturday Press eventually became a countercultural zine "with a mix of poetry, stories, radical politics, and an enthusiastic spirit of personal freedom and sexual openness. Before it folded in 1868, it published numerous poems by Whitman and a short story byMark Twain. The Saturday Press championedLeaves of Grass, a move that many view as a significant factor in the success of the 1860 edition."[1]
In 1870, Charles Pfaff moved his business up to midtown. Whitman wrote about Pfaff's inSpecimen Days after a visit to the restaurateur's newer location many years later:
An hour’s fresh stimulation, coming down ten miles ofManhattan Island by railroad and 8 o’clock stage. Then an excellent breakfast at Pfaff’s restaurant, 24th Street. Our host himself, an old friend of mine, quickly appear’d on the scene to welcome me and bring up the news, and, first opening a big fat bottle of the best wine in the cellar, talk about ante-bellum times, '59 and '60, and the jovial suppers at his Broadway place, near Bleecker Street.
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.
And there Pfaff and I, sitting opposite each other at the little table, gave a remembrance to them in a style they 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."[3]
The original location at 653 Broadway eventually became an envelope factory. In 1975, it became adisco called Infinity, which was destroyed by fire in 1979. Today, the location is home to a few shops.
In the spring of 2011, a restaurant and bar using the nameThe Vault at Pfaff's opened at 643 Broadway, near the original Pfaff's location. It too was accessed by descending a set of stairs, which led into a refurbished cellar.[5] The Vault at Pfaff's has since closed. However, in 2024 a new establishment opened, Delmonico's sister establishment TUCCI- New York by Max Tucci. The restaurant serves modern Italian cuisine in an elegant atmosphere with hints of Gilded Age days.