against commercial encroachments and in opposition to
great glaring signs that blurted out business announcements in a
bold-faced manner, that argued they had come to stay. While the
Broadway of to-day gives the impression of narrowness because of the
height of the sky-scrapers that border it, it then looked exceedingly
wide. It was never a quiet street, for a continual procession of
omnibuses and other vehicles on business and pleasure bent streamed
along it. Among the popular resorts at which they often stopped was
Charles Pfaff's, where beer was sold. There of an evening met the
literary Bohemians of the city, in the days when Bohemia really
existed and before the word had well-nigh lost significance and
respect. They were gifted men with great power of intellect, who
spoke without fear and without favor and whose every word expressed a
thought. They were real men and they made the world a real place, a
place without affectation, without pretence, without show, without
need of applause, and without undue cringing to mere conventional
forms. These were the characteristics of the Bohemians, and Bohemia
was wherever two or three of them were gathered together. Bohemia was
the atmosphere they carried with them, and whether upon the streets or
in Pfaff's cellar they were at home. Pfaff's happening to be a
convenient gathering-place, and beer happening to be the popular brew
with most of them, they gathered there.

It is a tradition that the place came into favor through the personal
efforts of the energetic Henry Clapp. He was attracted to it, so the
tradition runs, soon after he started the _Saturday Press_ in 1858,
that lively publication, so brilliant while it lasted, so soon to die,
and at its death having pasted on its outer door an announcement which
read: "This paper is discontinued for want of funds, which by a
coincidence is precisely the reason for which it was started." Whether
it is true or not that Clapp was the first to call attention to the
resort that came to be the meeting-place of the Bohemians, matters
little. It grew to be such a meeting-place, and it is quite true that
the members of the staff of the _Saturday Press_ did more than any one
else to give it a name that has lived through the years.

It is hard to locate Pfaff's place now. Go to look for it on the east
side of Broadway, above Bleecker Street three or four doors, and you
will be disappointed, for there is nothing to locate--just a
convent