Rebel Souls

by Justin Martin

  Pfaff’s was situated beneath the fashionable Coleman House. But the saloon had almost no relationship with the hotel above; no stairway descended from the lobby. Instead, it was necessary to find the street entrance, marked by the word Pfaff faintly lettered on the hotel’s gray brick exterior. (The full name—“Lager Bier Saloon” et al.—appeared only in newspaper advertisements.) Beneath this obscure sign was a hatchway in the Broadway sidewalk. One entered here, like going into a root cellar, proceeding down a steep, narrow metal stairway to the saloon.

  Pfaff’s was a surprisingly ample space, extending underground for much of the length of the hotel’s lobby above. It was also very modestly appointed. Sawdust covered the floors. A handful of wooden tables and chairs were scattered about. Above the conversational din, one could hear the distant clatter and neighs from the horse-drawn coaches on Broadway. The low ceiling hung thick with smoke; a small number of gaslights provided the sole illumination, faint and flickering. The play of shadows was extreme, contorting the saloon’s customers so that they looked by turns grotesquely squat or wildly elongated. All of these elements contributed to a kind of spectral, otherworldly feeling. The saloon operated Monday through Saturday with an official closing time of 1:00 a.m., though often patrons were still reveling hard as the sun began to rise over Manhattan’s East River. Here, the rules were meant to be broken.

  A big enticement for Clapp was the saloon’s coffee. It was cheap, just three cents a cup, but also strong and thick, reminding him of the coffee he’d so enjoyed in Paris. He also took a liking to Charles Ignatius Pfaff, the proprietor. Herr Pfaff was a round little man with shaggy eyebrows and chubby fingers. His Old World manner and thickly accented English gave him a courtly and discreet air. He favored a winking, confidential style that seemed to suggest that he would form no judgments whatsoever about his customers. Born in Baden, Switzerland, of German descent, he had arrived in New York in the early 1850s, part of a wave of German immigrants.

  Despite the spare ambience, it was possible to get a full meal at Pfaff’s. Pfaff employed a cook who specialized in pfannekuchen, a type of large, hardy German pancake. Also on the menu were beefsteak, Welsh rarebit, liver with bacon, and the saloon’s much-praised cheese plate. The food was good, but—more important—the liquor flowed freely. Pfaff was considered an excellent judge of champagne and offered a large selection of wines, including sauternes, volnays, and white burgundies, later more commonly known as chardonnay. But the big draw, per the establishment’s name, was lager. Pfaff and his fellow German immigrants had revolutionized beer making in America. From the old country, they brought brewing and aging techniques that produced beers that were lighter than English-style stouts and ales, to this point the mainstays of American drinking establishments. At Pfaff’s, lager was served in large pewter steins. And it was cold, a genuine novelty at a time when most pubs served beer at room temperature. Pfaff availed himself of refrigeration, then a cutting-edge luxury, and arranged for ice deliveries, making it possible both to serve beer cold and to preserve batches longer. A reminiscence of Pfaff’s saloon from many years later would describe its proprietor as “one of the first men in New York who thoroughly understood the art of drawing and keeping lager beer.”

  Clapp had found his Café Momus. He’d discovered a place with the right permissive air, a Manhattan equivalent to the Paris haunt of Henry Murger and friends. Now, it was just a matter of assembling a coterie of Bohemians.

  Of course, New York City had its share of Bohemians, even if they didn’t designate themselves as such . . . yet. The world was full of such types, always has been. Bohemians—in deed if not name—have existed throughout history, from Diogenes, the eccentric Greek philosopher who slept outdoors in a bathtub, to William Blake, the offbeat but visionary English artist. Such people have tended to live out their strange lives on the margins. Save for the French Bohemians, they haven’t been part of any larger movement; their mores and behaviors haven’t tended to be codified. Therein lay Clapp’s notion: to assemble a group of idiosyncratic New York artists and writers in emulation of the Parisian model that he’d experienced.

  His very first recruit was Fitz-James O’Brien, a friend and fellow journalist, followed quickly by a translator, a poet, and a soon-to-be famous cartoonist. There was no better choice to begin the group than O’Brien, the walking definition of Bohemian. To this point, he’d led a colorful and prodigal life. He was born in County Cork to a wealthy family, wealthy enough that they had painlessly weathered the Irish potato famines of the 1840s. Shortly after his twentieth birthday, he set off for London, flush with an £8,000 inheritance, seeking adventure in the big city and planning to become a famous writer. He landed a job at a newspaper that quickly folded. But he had no trouble finding adventure: O’Brien burned through his entire inheritance in only two years, the equivalent of spending roughly $1 million in current dollars. Then the husband of a woman O’Brien was having an affair with came home unexpectedly from a colonial post in India. O’Brien fled England for America, arriving nearly broke. He holed up in a fine Manhattan hotel, ordered bottle upon bottle of wine, stayed thoroughly soused, and then skipped out on a tab that he couldn’t possibly begin to cover.

  O’Brien was trim and moved with an athletic grace. He was only twenty-seven when Clapp tapped him as charter Bohemian, so his dissipated ways hadn’t yet caught up with him. He had a long crooked nose, a brush mustache, and a weak and tiny pointed chin—hardly handsome. But people couldn’t take their eyes off him. O’Brien was a peerless raconteur who had earned a reputation around town for spinning out enthralling tales. In all he said, in his every move, he conveyed worldliness and ease. He had this particular way of tilting his head, jutting out that tiny chin; it was extremely mannered, perhaps a vestige of his earlier life as a young Irish scion.

  But closer observation revealed that O’Brien had already traveled a vast distance from his youth, psychologically, and was in a very different place. Every time one saw him, he was guaranteed to have a new cut or scrape. O’Brien was a chronic brawler. Frequently, one of his eyes was blackened, the result of his latest drunken fistfight. According to legend, he once got into a fight with a perfect stranger over right-of-way on the sidewalk. He spent plenty of nights in the Jefferson Market jail. In O’Brien’s tellings, these set-tos always played as good fun, adventure. But every so often, people noticed an unaccountable look that crept into his eyes—a kind of animal desperation.

  O’Brien lived in a succession of ramshackle rooming houses, moving on whenever arrears grew too high and his charms with the landlady wore thin. But he clung to his goal of becoming a famous writer. And he had no trouble drumming up work, as an arresting yarn spinner possessed of a vaguely aristocratic air, face always curiously marred with some fresh scrape. Editors couldn’t resist; this was a man with stories to tell. But newspapers paid very little, and O’Brien had expensive tastes (he liked to treat his friends to steaks at Delmonico’s whenever he scored a payday) as well as a staggering alcohol tab to be met on a daily basis. Thus, he worked in a kind of fever. During his first years in New York, O’Brien had tried his hand at everything—short fiction, poems, criticism, editorials, society puff pieces, and hard-hitting reportage—for a dizzying array of publications, some solid, some very short lived: the American Whig Review, Putnam’s, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, the Home Journal, the Knickerbocker, the Leisure Hour. “Haste is evident in all that he wrote,” a friend recalled, adding that O’Brien saw no reason to “labor at a story, or a poem, when he could sell it as it was.”

  O’Brien recycled the names of his fictional characters, using Miss Halibut, Mrs. Honiton, and Croton Poole in several stories each. He penned a poem called “Helen Lee” and one equally hackneyed called “Dora Dee.” O’Brien even wrote a moralistic anti-boxing poem—despite his own proclivities—because an editor wanted it for the benefit of female readers. Another time, he landed an assignment with the New York Picayune t
o write a serial tale entitled “From Hand to Mouth.” The story was to cover familiar territory, featuring poverty-addled characters in seedy rooming houses. O’Brien was able to deliver only some of the installments, and the serial was left dangling.

  Rarely, very rarely, O’Brien was able to banish the noise from his head and achieve a kind of productive calm. On such occasions, it became clear how talented he really was. In 1854 he’d written a play, A Gentleman from Ireland, which enjoyed a successful run at Wallack’s Theatre in New York. And not long after that first visit to Pfaff’s, O’Brien began work on a fantastical short story. It was the tale of a man who uses a microscope to peer at a single droplet of water and spies a tiny world, complete with a beautiful woman. Through the magic of the lens, tantalizingly, the woman appears human size to him, and he falls in love with her. But there’s no way to bridge their worlds; the man can’t even figure out how to communicate his presence. As the droplet evaporates, he looks on helplessly as the object of his desire withers and dies. It was a masterful story, one that suggested the literary heights of which O’Brien was capable. But the moment would be fleeting. “No American writer ever had such chances of success as Fitz-James O’Brien,” that friend would recall, “ . . . and but one American writer ever threw such chances away so recklessly.”

  Just as Clapp had found success in his earlier career as a public speaker—despite being a slight, homely man with a thin, grating voice—he proved adept at assembling a devoted collection of Bohemian artists. He possessed a surprising charisma. A contemporary describes him as having “a certain kind of magnetism that drew and held men, though he was neither in person nor manner, what would be called attractive.”

  Besides O’Brien, among the early notables Clapp invited into his circle were Charles Halpine, George Arnold, and Thomas Nast. Halpine was a journalist who, among other jobs, translated articles from French papers for publication in the New York Herald. Despite a pronounced stutter, he was considered a sparkling conversationalist. Halpine regularly amazed and amused his companions with revealing new constructions such as “Harriet Be-seecher Be-stowe.” Arnold was a genial man who made a paltry living writing poems for newspapers, a career that’s unimaginable today. He employed a variety of pseudonyms such as “Pierrot,” “George Garrulous,” and “Chevalier M’Arone.” Known for composing light verse at lightning speed, he tossed off the following poem while drinking at Pfaff’s:

  Here,

  With my beer

  I sit,

  While golden moments flit:

  Alas!

  They pass

  Unheeded by.

  And, as they fly,

  I,

  Being dry,

  Sit, idly sipping here

  My beer.

  As for Thomas Nast, he frequented Pfaff’s before becoming famous. He first showed up as a teenager, maybe sixteen or seventeen (there was no drinking age), and worked for five dollars per week as an apprentice at Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Nast, small for his age and chubby, was known as the “fat little Dutch boy,” thanks to an unfortunate haircut. During his visits to Pfaff’s, he simply sat on the periphery of Clapp’s group in silent, red-faced intimidation. In a few years, however, he would emerge as the preeminent political cartoonist of nineteenth-century America, producing enduring caricatures of Boss Tweed and assorted robber barons for Harper’s, where he worked for more than two decades. A master at visual shorthand, he’s often credited with creating the elephant and donkey symbols for the Republican and Democratic Parties. Nast also illustrated Clement Moore’s classic A Visit from St. Nicholas, helping popularize the image of Santa Claus.

  During this earliest period, Clapp’s Bohemian group was fairly amorphous. On a given night, whatever people happened to show up would take over a table or two at the saloon and then fall into conversation about life and work and art. Many of them Clapp invited from his circle of acquaintances, which included a number of journalists. But others happened upon Pfaff’s as they walked along Broadway. Despite the obscure sign and sidewalk-hatchway entrance, people just seemed to find the place. Clapp quickly discovered that Pfaff’s very location, Broadway and Bleecker, was itself a great recruiting tool, drawing people that were curious—in both senses of the word.

  Broadway was then one of the world’s preeminent streets, described in a story in Putnam’s as “altogether the most showy, the most crowded, and the richest thoroughfare in America.” It was still a couple of years before Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux would begin work on Central Park. New York City had only a handful of small parks and precious few places for people to congregate. Given the lack of attractive public space, Broadway filled that role, and filled it admirably. While most New York streets were crabbed and narrow, Broadway was an ample road with wide sidewalks, making it an ideal place to stroll. People derived immense pleasure, and could be thoroughly entertained, simply by walking around. “Saints and sinners, mendicants and millionaires, priests and poets, courtesans and chiffoniers, burglars and bootblacks, move side by side in the multiform throng,” according to The Great Metropolis, a nineteenth-­century guidebook to New York City.

  The heart of Broadway was a two-mile stretch, from Chambers Street to Union Square. It had everything. In addition to Coleman House, there were about twenty other large hotels, including the stylish St. Nicholas and the modern New York Hotel, boasting indoor plumbing on every floor. This stretch was also the theater district, catering to every taste, highbrow to gutter. Laura Keene’s Varieties—a venue offering Shakespeare and other serious fare—had recently opened at 622 Broadway, across the street from Pfaff’s. But it was also possible to see a risqué play at one of the many concert saloons that lined Broadway or take in a blackface minstrel show at the Odd Fellow’s Opera House. (Nowadays, a play that’s “on Broadway” would likely be farther uptown, in an area developed during the twentieth century, where the street passes through Times Square.)

  Broadway was also the shopping district. There was a velocipede dealer, a chandelier maker, and Huyler’s candy store. There were numerous large emporiums such as Hearn Brothers and a particularly fancy and famous one run by the retail mastermind A. T. Stewart. A few years hence, Mary Todd Lincoln, in the grip of a shopping mania, would scour Broadway, wildly overshooting the $20,000 appropriated for White House decorations. She would then try to browbeat a lowly Washington bureaucrat, pushing him to shuffle around some funds to cover the overage, but the man refused.

  Perhaps most significantly, where Clapp was concerned, Pfaff’s was only about a ten-minute walk north along Broadway from newspaper row, home to dozens of dailies and specialty sheets. This meant that along with gawkers and shoppers and strollers, Clapp could also count on a steady stream of writers wandering into Pfaff’s.

  And then there’s Bleecker Street. “‘I lodge in Bleecker street’ is a biography in brief,” according to The Great Metropolis. By the 1850s, Bleecker Street, once a fashionable address, had gone completely to seed. “It more resembles some of the streets in Paris than any other in New-York,” continues the guidebook. “Bleecker Street is the place of rendezvous for countless illegitimate lovers. Husbands meet other men’s wives; wives meet other women’s husbands. . . . Many representatives of art of some kind repair to Bleecker street for the cheapness of its accommodations as well as for the freedom of its life. Poor scribblers and scholars, painters and engravers, actors and poets may be found in its lodgings.”

  Pfaff’s: at the intersection of Broadway and Bleecker. One way or another, plenty of people—the desired Bohemian types—discovered that subterranean saloon. Clapp lay waiting in his dusky lair, ready to pull them in.

  Soon, Clapp’s circle included people involved in all variety of creative pursuits. There were journalists, actors, and illustrators; there were poets, playwrights, painters, and sculptors. But one common trait that cut across many in this set was poverty, crushing
poverty. To make it as an artist in New York has always been tough, but never more than during the 1850s. In this way, it was very similar to Paris of the same era. By virtue of being thriving mercantile and cultural hubs, both cities lured in far more artists and writers than could possibly be supported.

  Matters grew still more dire when, early in the life of Clapp’s group, the economy was slammed by the Panic of 1857, one of the most severe downturns in US history. It left an estimated one hundred thousand New Yorkers out of work. By day, men formed long lines in the vain hope of landing temporary jobs; by night, feral former pets, released by households that could no longer afford them, roamed the streets, looking for food. According to legend, Cornelius Vanderbilt—hoping to catch some sleep—hired a personal exterminator to thin the army of stray cats that yowled through the night.

  Clapp’s circle wasn’t much better off. Even after the panic subsided, many remained both homeless and unemployed, a circumstance for which the Bohemians had a slang term: on the rock. Herr Pfaff was unusually lax about credit. He knew his clientele well, recognized that as soon as they earned any money they’d be back to settle the tab, and start a new one.

  O’Brien frequently found himself on the rock. Often, he was so destitute that he couldn’t afford the tools of his trade such as paper and ink. He would go to Pfaff’s hoping to connect with someone in better straits who could help him out. He’d charm the person into taking him home, usually to some nearby tenement. O’Brien would hole up and remain awake several days, scrawling furiously with a borrowed quill. Then he’d walk from magazine office to magazine office, peddling his story, sell it, return to Pfaff’s, buy everyone celebratory drinks, go broke, repeat.