Walt Whitman's Watering Hole

The Rumpus has an essay about Pfaff's, the place Whitman liked to chill.

From the piece...

Whitman became a regular at Pfaff’s after getting fired from the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1859. The years before the Civil War were a decadent period where Whitman played the bon vivant, finding friends and lovers among the New York counterculture. He is now a giant of the American canon, but as his contemporary William Dean Howells remembered, his celebrity in the 19th century was often “largely the infamy resulting from what many considered to be his obscene writings.”

The crowd that gathered at Pfaff’s was inspired by the bohemian literary culture of Paris’s Latin Quarter, which Henri Murger had chronicled in his 1851 collection of stories Scènes de la Vie de Bohême. Bohemians were lovers of art, and drink, and witty conversation, and rejected mainstream paths to success and fulfillment. They accepted poverty as a matter of course. The Pfaff’s group loved the idea of Paris. But in New York, with its dirty streets and jostling crowds, they also found beauty.

Whitman loved New York. Some days, he’d ride up and down Broadway, chatting with the omnibus drivers and jostling with fruit sellers. In the season, he’d go to the opera. As transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott remembered, Whitman ‘lived to make poems, and for nothing else in particular.’ And at night, beneath his beloved streets, he went to Pfaff’s.