Bohemians at the Vault at Pfaff’s

Bohemianism at the Vault at Pfaff’s

In the years leading up to the Civil War, Walt Whitman spent most nights at Charles Pfaff’s beer cellar in downtown Manhattan. Pfaff’s was the meeting place for a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals who were attempting to recreate the bohemian culture of Paris’s Latin Quarter recently made popular by Henri Murger’s 1851 book Scénes de la vie de Bohème [Scenes of Bohemian Life]. What actually took place at Pfaff’s has long been a mystery, in large part because period accounts are incomplete and inconsistent. As this pair of illustrations from 1864 suggest, it was uncertain if the bohemians were hedonists or students of the arts—or if women had a meaningful role in the community or not.