For several years just before and just after his 1860 edition of; Leaves of Grass; appeared, Walt Whitman regularly frequented Pfaff's beer cellar in downtown Manhattan. The basement bar was the very center of mid-nineteenth-century American bohemian activity and was heavily patronized by writers, artists, musicians, actors, intellectuals, and radicals such as free-love advocate Henry Clapp, Jr., and Broadway; succès de scandale; Adah Isaacs Menken. Numerous creative and political ventures emerged from this environment, and at least two bohemian literary weeklies,; The New-York Saturday Press and |