The Women at Pfaff's
/If you were a self-styled Bohemian in New York in the late 1850s and early 1860s, your place to hang out was Pfaff’s in Greenwich Village (address at the time, 643 Broadway). Creatives and would-be creatives met around the tables to drink, smoke, and talk. From an enduring-fame perspective, Walt Whitman was its most famous regular. Although the idea of gay culture (or LGBTQ as a distinct identity) was virtually unrecognized, Pfaffians included gay men who called themselves the Fred Gray Association, after their principal convener.
An illustration that appeared in New York Illustrated News in 1864. No one is individually identified, but note the women drinking beer, canoodling, and sitting at the table.
As I learn about New York during this time period, I have come across mention of Pfaff’s many times. One thing I wondered—did women go to Pfaff’s?
Short answer: Yes, both as regulars and occasional visitors.
The primary one was known as the “Queen of the Long Table”—the long table being even longer than what you see in the illustration. (It could fit 30 people.) The Queen gave herself the name Ada Clare, the heroic orphan from Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. Other actresses and writers came to Pfaff’s through Ada and through other friends, lovers, and co-workers. A few are highlighted below.
My main source is the archive/repository at Lehigh University called, fittingly enough, The Vault at Pfaff’s. I also read Rebel Souls by Justin Martin, the website of the NCY LGBT Project, and many primary sources mentioned in all three. But I consider this a blog-in-progress. If you have information about other women, or more to add to some of the scanter descriptions below, let me know!
Swiss emigre Charles Ignatius Pfaff opened the place in 1859, very much European inspired. Like a German rathskellar, it was in a basement, with steps leading down to several large dark rooms. Like a cafe in Paris, it catered to a new identity of free spirits who called themselves Bohemians. Pfaff let an American named Henry Clapp, who had spent time in Paris, use one of the rooms. He (the “King”) and Ada weighed in on who merited a seat at their long table. Word spread. Beer, coffee, and food were cheap. Men smoked cigars; women, more shockingly, could come without male chaperones and smoke cigarettes. Clapp also launched a newspaper called the Saturday Press, which published many of the Pfaffians and reviewed their works published elsewhere and their theatrical performances.
Despite the anti-conventional spirit, these Bohemians did not get involved in abolition or other political reforms of the day. Ada Clare financed her lifestyle from an inheritance that came from a South Carolina cotton plantation. Much has been written about Whitman’s ambivalent views of slavery and race, such as this article at the Whitman Archive. A few expressed opposition to slavery but they reflected the apathy of the large majority of the white population.
By the 1890s, nostalgic articles appeared about the scene and “the old Pfaff crowd.” There were several attempts to re-create Pfaff’s (including a recent restaurant, now closed) and many waves of people identified themselves as Bohemians for decades. But the Pfaffians were the first in America.
“Not much is known”
In the bits that I could find about the women (many ideas for further research here!), common threads emerged. They include such terms as: “not much is known about her early life,” “poverty,” “morphine,” “divorce.” What I am thinking about this:
In the circumscribed era of the mid-19th century, a self-selecting group made their way to Pfaff’s. They were already living against the grain and so they naturally would have continued that way.
Many of these free-spirited women made their money as actresses and writers; some also received money as mistresses, wives, or ex-wives of wealthy men. As they aged, their income shrank. Thus, the downward spiral.
The lack of documentation about women of the time leaves out a lot more than we can see.
Queen of the Long Table
Ada Clare—with short hair!
Ada Agnes McElhenney was born in 1834 and raised by her grandparents after the death of her parents. She spent several summer “seasons” in Saratoga, New York, something that many wealthy Southerners did at the time. But rather than go back home, she moved to New York and wrote under her assumed name, Ada Clare. She had a son out of wedlock in Paris. In most cases at the time, this spelled ruin for mother and child. In her case, she had inherited enough money that she could move back to New York. (Note: If she had married, she probably would have lost control of the money.)
She acted some, wrote some, parented some, and developed her persona. In the late 1860s, she moved to San Francisco, then toured as an actress. She was bitten by a rabid dog and died in what sounds like an excruciating manner in 1874, age 39.
Actresses
Ada Clifton, an occasional Pfaff visitor, was born in 1835 in Germany. She began acting in the mid-1850s. The Saturday Press reviewed her performances; in 1859, the “pretty actress” is reported to have traveled to Havana, Cuba. She lived a relatively long life for a Pfaffian, dying in 1891 at age 56.
Laura Keene, born in 1826 (or so, apparently). She came to New York in 1852, toured, then returned in 1855. She ran a theatre company near Pfaff’s, highly unusual for a woman. She and many of her actors and actresses naturally made their way to Pfaff’s. She married at age 17 in England, had two daughters but her husband was shipped off to Australia as a convict. With her mother to care for her children, she took on a new name and moved to America . (Her daughters later joined her.) In 1865, between gigs, she was asked to star in the play that President Lincoln was watching the night he was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre. This was a traumatizing event—she was briefly imprisoned and sharply questioned. Her gown, “with Lincoln’s blood,” became an object of morbid curiosity, not to mention valuable. She bequeathed it to one of her daughters when she died of TB in 1873, age 47.
Adah Menken was another self-invented celebrity born in 1835. She claimed numerous stories to explain her past, but started out in Louisiana. She married Alexander Menken in 1856 and moved with him to Cincinnati where she became devoutly Jewish. She wrote poetry, separated from Menken, remarried several times, and was considered one of the most charismatic of the Pfaffians. Related to one her husbands, it was written at the time, that he "unconsciously did the funniest thing of his life when he married the beautiful and seductive Adah Isaacs Menken, thinking that he could reform her. She proved false and faithless to him, as she had to half a dozen other men, but Kerr sincerely loved her, and the blow, which his own credulity brought him, was a cruel and lasting one." She moved to San Francisco with Ada Clare and later to Paris, where she died in 1868, age 33.
Lola Montez, of many names over the years, and briefly managed by Nathaniel Parker Willis’s brother Edward.
Lola Montez—Okay, I know this is sounding familiar, but here is another person with a raft of identifies and murky past. She was “probably” Irish, “probably” born in 1820, and seems to have met Henry Clapp when both were in Paris. She married into Bavarian royalty for a while, thus being able to affix the title “Countess of Landsfeld” to her name. She was not considered very talented, but knew how to work the crowd. When it seemed that her dancing was becoming less appreciated, she launched a lecture tour. She died in 1861, age 41.
Dora Shaw, born in 1828, had married a clergyman in Ohio. When she divorced him, her family shunned her. So what else, she moved to New York to act. In 1859, an article in Henry Clapp’s Saturday Press described her attempt to eat hashish (one of the male regulars, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, had made his fame from his book about hashish). As noted in an article in the late 1800s, “Of aristocratic birth, education and marriage, her family ignored her when she divorced. Dora, as her name imports, was a golden woman of poetical tendencies.” Although a golden girl in her prime, she fell into poverty and died at the Forrest Home in Philadelphia in 1891, which was set up by actor Edwin Forrest as “a refuge for those members of the dramatic profession who suffered absolute from need.”
Writers and Artists
Several female journalists and other writers were part of the Pfaff’s crowd: Anna Ballard, Jennie Danforth, Margaret Eytinge, Mary Fox, Mary Goldbeck, Matilda Heron, Clara Kellogg, and Annette Nelson, among others.
A future post will focus on them.
The Willis Connection
I am looking at what I read with an eye to determining any connection to writer Nathaniel Parker Willis and his family, First, I thought he had spent more time than he did at Pfaff’s. An 1892 article placed him at the long table, but he would not have been a regular. His age (born in 1806, thus quite a bit older than most of the regulars), location (although he came down to New York often, he lived in Cornwall during Pfaff’s heyday), and tastes (far more “refined”) argue against it. However, he published many of them in the publication he edited, the Home Journal. In 1844, he also gave a job to the Pfaffians’ (deceased) muse, Edgar Allen Poe. His wife Cornelia was definitely not one of the women at Pfaff’s.
His sister Sara Willis, who wrote under the name Fanny Fern, may have stopped by, although she, too, was older than most Pfaffians. She was, however, an early supporter of Walt Whitman, until they had a falling-out. Her son-in-law, a journalist named Mortimer Thompson, was also part of the larger circle at Pfaff’s.
One other weird Willis connection relates to Lola Montez. The “black sheep” of the Willis family was a younger brother named Edward. I have read that he was imprisoned in Ohio (yet to be confirmed) but somehow managed to make his way to New York and became Lola’s manager in 1852. It sounds like they needed each other for their next chapters.