Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [566]
Clapp’s circle found a home in 1855 when Charles Pfaff, a rotund German Swiss, opened a basement beer hall on Broadway, just north of Bleecker Street. Modeled on the rathskellers and underground grottos becoming popular in Europe, Pfaff’s offered the best coffee in town along with rich German beers, fine wines, and cheeses. At the cellar’s far end, extending beneath the sidewalk upon which Broadway’s endless crowds promenaded, was a vaulted “cave.” Here Pfaff reserved a long table for Clapp’s crew, who would filter in by late afternoon and again after an evening at the theater, to eat, drink, and inveigh against dull, respectable Manhattanites.
The bohemians adopted the departed Poe as their patron saint, attracted by his morbid writings, but they made Walt Whitman their reigning luminary. Even if he was not the most loquacious of the regulars (“my own greatest pleasure at Pfaff’s,” Whitman recalled, “was to look on—to see, talk little, absorb”) he nevertheless spread the tavern’s fame by writing of “The vault at Pfaff’s where the drinkers and laughers / meet to eat and drink and carouse / While on the walk immediately overhead pass the myriad / feet of Broadway.” By decades end, Pfaff’s vied with Castle Garden, Tammany Hall, and Barnum’s Museum as a New York City landmark.
The bohemians, in turn, promoted Walt’s reputation. In 1858 Clapp founded the New York Saturday Press, an irreverent weekly with radical perspectives on art and politics that showcased new American writing, especially Whitman’s. In distant Ohio, the youthful William Dean Howells was so impressed by the journal—it “really embodied the new literary life of the city”—that he made a pilgrimage to Pfaff’s in 1860 to visit its resident poet.
None of this paid Whitman’s bills. Having failed to support himself as a free-lance writer, he had returned to full-time journalism in 1857, becoming editor of the Brook-lyn Daily Times. His poetry had dried up too (though shortly to reflower), perhaps because he had exhausted the material he’d been ingesting for years. Leaves of Grass, he would later say, “arose out of my life in Brooklyn and New York from 1838 to 1853, absorbing a million people, for fifteen years, with an intimacy, an eagerness, an abandon, probably never equalled.”
41
Life Above Bleecker
In 1845, with the great mid-century boom just getting underway, only two men—John Jacob Astor and Peter G. Stuyvesant—possessed estates whose value topped the million-dollar mark. So many and so great were the fortunes accumulated over the next decade, however, that by the mid-fifties New York was home to dozens of so-called millionaires—a new word for a new social reality.
“Wealth,” mused George Templeton Strong, “is rushing in upon us like a freshet,” and it was clear who had navigated the current most successfully. In 1856 9,122 individuals were assessed for tax purposes as having a net worth of at least ten thousand dollars. Of this group, which collectively possessed the overwhelming bulk of the city’s wealth, close to half engaged in mercantile pursuits, with merchants, auctioneers, brokers, and agents being far and away the richest New Yorkers in this, their Golden Age. Rentiers and others who profited from soaring land values did well too, making up about a fifth of the top taxpayers. Roughly another fifth owned goods-producing firms, a category that embraced ironmasters like Peter Cooper and contractors like Alexander Masterson, the Scots stoneyard owner who erected the Customs House. A tenth of the rich were professionals, though many owed their ranking more to capital than credentials, having parlayed substantial fortunes and family connections into lucrative careers in law, doing probate and trust work, or in medicine, attending to fellow patricians.
New York’s economic elite had ballooned in size and complexity as well as wealth. The city teemed with bankers,