97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (6 page)

A typical Sunday in a German beer garden, 1872, this one located on the Bowery.
Collection of the New-York Historical Society

Chroniclers of nineteenth-century New York were drawn to the beer halls for the vivid subject matter they provided. They marveled at the vastness of the rooms, the quantity of beer consumed in a single business day, and the quality of the house musicians. The one subject no one seemed to care too much about was the food. The most we can say is that it was hearty and simple. Brown bread seasoned with caraway, plates of Swiss and Limburger cheese, sliced ham, pickles, and salted pretzels were all standard beer-hall fare. Some patrons brought their own picnic-style snacks of bread and sausage or bread and cheese—a practice welcomed by the beer-hall management so long as they paid for the drinks.

A more elaborate meal awaited diners at the German “lunch rooms” that once thrived in New York. Down near the tip of the island, in the heart of the financial district, the lunch rooms served an all-male clientele of shipping agents, bankers, lawyers, and insurance brokers. Mixed in among the businessmen were a scattering of journalists and engravers from nearby Printing House Square, where all the city newspapers had their offices. In fact, one German lunch room, the Rathskeller, was housed in the basement of the
Staats Zeitung
, New York’s largest German-language newspaper. There was also the Postkeller at the corner of Broadway and Barclay, Hollander’s at the intersection of Broadway and Chambers, and Dietz on North William Street. At these eateries, customers could dine on a bowl of soup, a cut from a joint of meat, vegetables, salad, and a glass of beer, all for 35 cents. Ermich’s, at the corner of Nassau and John streets, was a crowded basement room with large communal tables where diners could start their meal with a bowl of smoked-sausage-and-lentil soup. If they wanted bread for dunking, they cut off a hunk from a shared loaf at the center of the table. (Etiquette at Ermich’s demanded that each diner wipe his knife across the top of the bread before cutting his slice.) Entrées included fish balls smothered in red cabbage, Vienna sausage with “half-half” (a side dish that was half mashed potatoes and half sauerkraut), or a “fricatelleu [stew] of minced meat surrounded by a browned crust composed of equal parts of flour and potato.” There was also schnitzel (fried veal cutlet), sliced tongue with raisin sauce, and a dish called “Hamburger steak,” a form of ground beef “redeemed from its original toughness by being mashed into mincemeat and then formed into a conglomerated mass.”
²⁵
This not-too-appetizing description is among the earliest reference to a future American staple, the hamburger, seen here at the very start of its culinary journey.

The German restaurants that proliferated in nineteenth-century New York appealed to both immigrant diners and native-born citizens. In fact, of all the city’s foreign restaurants, French and Italian included, Americans showed the greatest admiration for those owned by Germans. Their fondness reflected how they perceived the immigrant himself. Until World War I, when global politics recast Germans as “enemy aliens,” Americans considered Germans the model immigrants—industrious, intelligent, highly cultivated, and impeccable in their personal hygiene. Temperamentally, the German was jovial and attentive to his guests, qualities that made him an ideal restaurant host. And unlike Americans, constrained by their puritan discomfort with bodily pleasures, Germans knew how to relish their food. “Of all the foreign elements in town,” one New Yorker remarked, “none delight more in good eating and drinking than the Germans.”
²⁶
In the 1870s and 1880s, the hundreds of German restaurants scattered through the city became popular gathering spots for New York businessmen, professionals, and “clubmen,” who spent their leisure hours in the city’s many gentlemen’s clubs. The most celebrated German establishment was Sieghortner’s, located in the old Astor mansion on Lafayette Place. Guidebooks to New York listed Sieghortner’s among the city’s premier dining spots, ranking it second only to Delmonico’s.

Around the corner, at Bleecker and Broadway, a very different crowd was assembled at a German restaurant called Pfaff’s. Named for its owner, Charles Pfaff, it served as the unofficial headquarters for the city’s “Bohemian” set, making it one of the first “ethnic” eateries to attract socially prominent New Yorkers. Of course, Swiss-owned Delmonico was “ethnic” too, but in the most refined and elegant way possible. Pfaff’s, by contrast, was a dive. It opened early in the 1850s in a dingy and ill-ventilated space that was literally under the Broadway sidewalk. But that was part of its charm. The subterranean location gave it a hidden-in-plain-sight kind of allure captured by Walt Whitman, an honorary Bohemian and steady Pfaff’s customer:

The vault at Pfaff’s where the drinkers and laughers

meet to eat and carouse,

While on the walk immediately overhead pass the

myriad feet of Broadway.
²⁷

The part Whitman leaves out is that customers could actually look up and see the shadowy forms of passersby, visible through glass bull’s-eyes that had been set into the pavement.

The Bohemians who gathered at Pfaff’s were the beatniks of their time. Self-proclaimed rebels, they laughed at bourgeois respectability and flaunted social convention, sexual and otherwise. Their ringleader was Henry Clapp, a newspaperman who returned from a trip to Paris fired up by Henry Murger’s 1851 novel,
Scènes de la vie de Bohème
, which is where the term “Bohemian” originates. His followers included Ada Clare (a writer and actress), Edward Wilkins (drama critic for
The Herald
), George Arnold (essayist and poet), Artemus Ward (a humorist), and the poet Walt Whitman, who was more a revered spectator than a full-fledged participant.

An unobtrusive but sympathetic character, Charley Pfaff, owner and host, became a minor celebrity in his own right. Contemporaries said he ran the best bar in New York, stocking it with a broad selection of the finest European wines. He was better known, however, for his imported beer, the beverage of choice among his Bohemian clientele. As you might imagine, the Bohemians liked to arrive late. Their midnight suppers consisted of oysters, steak, liver and bacon, and Welsh rarebit, the typical foods of a New York chop house. Alongside these American staples, the kitchen prepared “foreign” specialties like
pfankuchen
, Frisbee-sized German pancakes. It was a dish admired by the Ohio-born novelist William Dean Howells on his visit to Pfaff’s in 1860.

G
ERMAN
P
ANCAKES

One heaping cup flour, ½ teaspoonful salt, 2 cupfuls milk or water, 3 eggs. Sift flour and salt into a bowl, add the milk and the 3 yolks, mix it into a smooth batter; beat the 3 whites to a stiff froth, add gradually the batter to the beaten white while stirring constantly. Place a medium-sized frying pan over the fire, with ½ tablespoonful butter or lard; as soon as hot, pour in sufficient of the mixture to cover the bottom of the pan, shake the pan to and fro and bake till light brown on the underside, turn over and bake the other; slip the pancake onto a hot plate, bake the remaining batter the same way, and serve at once. This will make 4 pancakes.
²⁸

The revelries under the sidewalk lasted until 1861, when the start of the Civil War effectively broke up the Bohemian circle. Though the sparkle was gone, Pfaff’s remained open at the same address (653 Broadway) for another fourteen years, then moved uptown to West 24th Street, following the city’s shifting center of gravity. The new restaurant was a money-losing proposition and closed for good in 1887, three years before the death of its genial and once-famous owner.

When Pfaff’s first opened in the 1850s, New York’s main entertainment district ran along Lower Broadway in the neighborhood that eventually became SoHo. Over the next quarter-century, as the city expanded northward, the Broadway theaters began to migrate uptown, pausing for a while at 14th Street.

For roughly three decades, the blocks between Third Avenue and Broadway on 14th Street provided New Yorkers with a broad range of diversions, from opera performances at the Academy of Music to musical comedies starring Lillian Russell at the New Fourteenth Street Theater. When the shows let out, all of those theatergoers needed somewhere to eat. Their first choice was Luchow’s, one of many saloons that lined the wide corridor of 14th Street. All of these businesses were immigrant-owned and-run, serving up German, Austrian, and Hungarian cooking to a mixed crowd of fellow immigrants, native New Yorkers, tourists, and visiting artists from around the world.

One vivid portrait of Luchow’s comes from a hard-drinking New York journalist, Benjamin DeCasseres, who looks back on his favorite saloon through the lens of Prohibition. Writing in 1931, he remembers his first visit to Luchow’s nearly forty years earlier, when he was a young reporter just discovering New York:

The dark wood, the high ceiling, the ultra Teutonic waiters, the dripping bar, the mounded free lunch, the heavenly odor of pig’s knuckles, sauerkraut, and
Paprika
Schnitzel—all of the things saturated me with an indescribable feeling of contentment.

I anchored at the bar and discovered at once that the quality and the upkeep of the beer in the place were all that my crapulous newspaper friend had told me. As it went down
—Seidel after Seidel—
every atom of my body bloomed with radiant philanthropy. Dill pickles and tiny raw onions burst in my throat and sprayed my brain with a fine tickle.
²⁹

DeCasseres was a fixture at the Luchow’s bar, where the Pilsners “tasted like moonlight.” He also spent time in the dining room, eating his way through the Luchow’s menu. Here are the dishes he remembered most fondly:

Veal Schnitzel with Wild Mushrooms

Boiled Beef with Horseradish

Bratwurst with Sauerkraut

Sauerbraten with Potato Dumplings

Stewed Goose with Calves’ Feet

Pan-fried Hamburger

Young Pigeon with Asparagus

Luchow’s specialized in roast goose, duck, and venison, and was likewise known for its crisp potato pancakes and homemade frankfurters.

The Academy of Music closed in 1886, forced out of business by the newly built Metropolitan Opera House. In time, the rest of the theaters followed suit. Some closed permanently, others moved uptown to the more fashionable entertainment district around 42nd Street. Robbed of their customers, the saloons vanished too. Incredibly, Luchow’s managed to hang on until 1982, haunting 14th Street like a stranded visitor from another time.

The journey from Ermich’s lunch room to Pfaff’s to Luchow’s traced a rough semicircle that skirted the edges of
Kleindeutschland
. All three establishments played a major part in the transmission of German food ways to mainstream America. The frankfurters and hamburgers eaten in similar nineteenth-century German restaurants have become so thoroughly assimilated that we hardly recognize them as German at all. Within
Kleindeutschland
proper, however, immigrants like the Glockners patronized smaller, less glamorous eateries where the crowds were exclusively German. Though scattered throughout the German wards, they were especially thick along the Bowery, the center of downtown nightlife, and on Avenue A, the Germans’ restaurant row.

More than the Irish or Russians or Italians, the Germans saw eating as a public activity, an occasion to leave the tenement and venture into the larger world. The typical immigrant restaurant displayed its offerings along the bar, which doubled as a buffet counter, the food arranged like a Flemish still life. A visitor to one such eating place, stunned by the copious display, described how the bar was

piled with joints and manufactured meats adapted to the strong German stomach;—enormous fat hams, not thoroughly boiled, for the German prefers his pig underdone: rounds of cold corned beef, jostled by cold roast legs and loins of veal; pyramids of sausages of every known size and shape, and several cognate articles of manufactured swine meat….

There were also baskets of freshly baked pretzels, mounds of Swiss and Limburger cheese, heaps of sliced onion, earthenware jars of caviar and a large glass jar of pickled oysters. The attached dining room, its walls painted with mountain scenery, was busy throughout the day and deep into the night, a feeding ground for German tradesmen, doctors, lawyers, and merchants, often accompanied by their wives and children. Both at home and in public, Germans preferred to dine as a family.
³⁰

But public dining on a grand scale was connected with the many clubs and societies that formed the core of German social life in nineteenth-century New York. Known as
Vereine
, they were a carryover from the Old Country. The
Vereine
developed in Germany during the late 1700s, part of a new city-based culture in which merchants and trades people banded together in professional and political associations, representing their interests as the new German middle class. As German immigrants recreated the
Vereine
in New York, the clubs lost their political edge, or most of it, and became more purely social.

Just about every New York German belonged to at least one
Verein
, and some belonged to many of them, especially if they were reasonably well-off and could afford the membership fees. Any shared experience or common interest was reason to join a
Verein
. Some were organized around place of origin, while others were based on occupation, like the German grocers’ or brewers’
Vereine
. Common-interest
Vereine
were for serious lovers of poetry or music or drama or athletics, though some were based on the flimsiest of excuses. In the 1880s, a group of German Jews living in Harlem established a
Schnorrer’s
(Yiddish for “moocher”)
Verein
, which hosted an annual clambake. Among the most prominent
Vereine
in
Kleindeutschland
were German singing societies like the Arion Club, which sang President Lincoln’s funeral hymn on the steps of City Hall as his body lay in state in the Grand Rotunda.