Thomas Nast: His Period and His Pictures

This biography of the illustrator Thomas Nast makes brief mention of Nast's involvement with the Pfaff's bohemians in a chapter that details Nast's time working for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Paper (chapter 4, "At Leslie's"). "The Leslie publication office was at that time on Frankfort Street, between William and Nassau" (21), which was about a mile-and-a-half straight down Broadway from Pfaff's. Paine mentions that Nast and other Leslie employees, such as Richard Henry Stoddard Sol Eytinge, and Mortimer Thompson ("Doesticks"), frequented Pfaff's together at this time. He writes, "Often in their rounds they brought up at Pfaff's beer-cellar, on Broadway near Bleecker Street--a bohemian resort, long since vanished and now become historic" (22). Paine also waxes nostalgic for the literary and artistic liveliness of mid-nineteenth-century New York that he, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, believes has already passed: "It was not so big a town then, but one feels, somehow, that there was more comradeship, more characteristic personality, more of the feeling and flavor of art than we find here to-day" (22).