Pfaff's

You are standing near the site of what was once the most notorious basement in New York City. During the late eighteen fifties, a Swiss immigrant named Charles Pfaff opened a beer cellar here that became the unlikely headquarters for the city's first true bohemian movement. It was a subterranean refuge for writers, actors, and artists who rejected the stifling social conventions of the era. The space was literally carved out beneath the sidewalk, a dim and smoky cave where the sound of bustling Broadway traffic rumbled directly overhead while a radical intellectual circle drank lager and debated the future of American culture below.