pfaff’s bar\/\/ loft dance\/\/ 19th-20th century bohemian nightlife

Whitman meeting a young and fussy looking William Dean Howells at Pfaff's bar, 1850's

The avant garde has its origins in a longer culture of aesthetic dissidence in the West known as bohemia. It’s a style of life that mixes poverty and snobbery as accessories, flipping between arch taste and low company, or low taste and arch company. Bohemians are essentially a sub-sect of the middle class that have flamboyantly and perennially protested against the rituals, religions, and habits of their origin. Bohemia is a sort of nomadic place then, through which a variety of people pass, a sort of metamorphic interstage that provides the frame for a variety human trajectories.

In the United States, the authoritative history of early American bohemianism, Garrets and Pretenders (1933) by Albert Parry, traces bohemia back to a bar in antebellum New York City called Pfaff’s. On Broadway just above Bleecker St. on the west side, in a space now occupied by a bodega, Han’s Grocery apparently. Back in the mid-nineteenth century public house, people could socializing without the constraint of home and station. It was visited by the city’s artists, actors, and writers especially, who came partly to see the Good Gray Poet in his prime.

Whitman wrote a poem about Pfaff’s, never published, entitled “The Two Vaults,” meaning first the vaulted ceiling of the underground bar. It was, like many excellent New York bars to present day, below the street, with stairway and evocative beams or mists of lamplight climbing down.  The second’s a bar we all cross, and have crossed, and will cross, hopefully burning free the whole way down…

“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
As the dead in their graves are underfoot hidden
And the living pass over them, recking not of them,
Laugh on laughers!
Drink on drinkers!
Bandy the jest!
Toss the theme from one to another!
Beam up—Brighten up, bright eyes of beautiful young men!
Eat what you, having ordered, are pleased to see placed before you—after the work of the day, now, with appetite eat,
Drink wine—drink beer—raise your voice,
Behold! your friend, as he arrives—Welcome him, where, from the upper step, he looks down upon you with a cheerful look
Overhead rolls Broadway—the myriad rushing Broadway
The lamps are lit—the shops blaze—the fabrics vividly are seen through the plate glass windows
The strong lights from above pour down upon them and are shed outside,
The thick crowds, well-dressed—the continual crowds as if they would never end
The curious appearance of the faces—the glimpse just caught of the eyes and expressions, as they flit along,
(You phantoms! oft I pause, yearning, to arrest some one of you!
Oft I doubt your reality—whether you are real—I suspect all is but a pageant.)
The lights beam in the first vault—but the other is entirely dark
In the first”

And then it ends.  Where all bright bar stars and everybody else ends. Like did Pfaff’s, as must all good parties.  But, and in keeping with the week’s theme, the ghosts of rabbles past have been knocking around that lower Broadway block for one hundred and fifty years, haunting and hurting and waiting, it turns out, for David Mancuso’s famous loft parties, one of the the birthplaces of dance music, which ran at 647 Broadway (see the comments in the link), the building next door to Han’s on the second floor, from 1969-1975. What it means is what it means, what we all believe in: a drink and a dance.

There is a useful website put out by the English department at Lehigh University that provides a full and free digital archive of the bar’s informally in-house literary organ, the well-regarded Saturday Press which was in its heyday a rival of Atlantic. Mark Twain’s “Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was first published there, for instance. There’s also a glossary of the bar’s less well-known patrons.  If you can’t find Parry’s book at the local Carnegie library, check out David Reynold’s big-picture Whitman biography or Luc Sante’s good-time Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York.

Enjoy your weekend, and do find your own Pfaff’s, wherever you can…

Tags: bohemia, dance music, david mancuso, ghosts love the rain, new york city history, walt whitman, william dean howells