Pfaff's

"[1] Habitués included journalist and social critic Henry Clapp, Jr., Walt Whitman, author and actress Ada Clare, poet and actress Adah Isaacs Menken, playwright John Brougham, artist Elihu Vedder, pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (who also had an affair with Ada Clare), actor Edwin Booth, author Fitz Hugh Ludlow, and humorist Artemus Ward.

Started as a literary magazine, The Saturday Press eventually became a countercultural zine "with a mix of poetry, stories, radical politics, and an enthusiastic spirit of personal freedom and sexual openness.

Whitman wrote about Pfaff's in Specimen Days after a visit to the restaurateur's newer location many years later: An hour’s fresh stimulation, coming down ten miles of Manhattan Island by railroad and 8 o’clock stage.

Our host himself, an old friend of mine, quickly appear’d on the scene to welcome me and bring up the news, and, first opening a big fat bottle of the best wine in the cellar, talk about ante-bellum times, '59 and '60, and the jovial suppers at his Broadway place, near Bleecker Street.

And there Pfaff and I, sitting opposite each other at the little table, gave a remembrance to them in a style they would have themselves fully confirm’d, namely, big, brimming, fill’d-up champagne-glasses, drain’d in abstracted silence, very leisurely, to the last drop.