Love and Lager

This basement is crowded with people– singing along or shouting over a brass band, laughing, dancing, arguing, chasing children, crashing mugs of lager beer together and spilling the contents on the floor. We are in Schneider’s Lager Bier Saloon at 97 Orchard Street sometime in the late 19th century. Of course, at this time, the Lower East Side was filled to the brim with lager beer saloons run by German immigrants — dozens on every block along Essex, Ludlow, Forsyth, and more. 

Who are we? We are residents from an apartment upstairs, laborers, artisans, mutual aid society members waiting to call a meeting, lager dealers, local politicians, Temperance Society spies. We are moochers hoping no one will notice our repeated trips to the free lunch table. We are members of the band, veterans of the Civil War, immigrants from one of the German States, close friends of John- the proprietor- or just here to get a letter notarized. This is our first time here, or we are regulars. We are here with our family or we are here alone…hoping to meet someone.

We contain multitudes.

In this cloudy dark room, we are connected by our search for companionship. Through retelling old battle tales, playing in the band, or engaging in political discourse, we gravitate to one another in this basement. But it is the search for romantic companionship that directs our gaze back to the ‘Lager Bier’ advert. Standing under a banner of text reading, “A Family Drink” is a bearded white man dressed in a suit- one hand on the shoulder of a white woman (who we presume to be his wife), the other holding a beer. The woman offers their swaddled child a glass of beer.

At a glance the image is humorous and harmless, but something about it makes us feel left out. What if our ideas about family are different? What does it mean if we don’t conform to the heterosexual standards of family and love presented in this image? To honestly explore the fullness of humanity on display in Schneider’s saloon, to disrupt exclusionary standards, and to break the long-held silence, our interpretation must include the presence of same-sex relationships.

Until recent decades, gay history remained profoundly underrepresented- the direct result of heteronormative bias and homophobic violence. Presently, there are no primary sources regarding gay relationships in Schneider’s. But does that mean gay couples never met there? Excluding gay narratives from the saloon becomes a form of erasure, further perpetuating silence.

Fortunately, secondary sources, however rare, establish a foundation for including gay narratives; and for that we need only travel to Pfaff’s- a nearby German bier saloon.

Charles Ignatius Pfaff immigrated from Baden in the early 1850s and settled into the saloon business in the basement of the Coleman House Hotel at 647 Broadway in 1859. Lured by the promised ‘Best of everything, at moderate prices,’ radical thinkers, actors, politicos, artists, celebrities, and journalists, gathered alongside common laborers and artisans in Pfaff’s. This unfiltered combination of people was not only an inspiration to New York City’s Bohemian circle, who made Pfaff’s their headquarters, it also supported an atmosphere for free expression- including expressions of same-sex intimacy. In contemporary parlance, Pfaff’s would be considered an LGBTQ safe-space.

Walt Whitman, perhaps the most famous of the New York Bohemians, and his romantic partner Fred Vaughan found comfort in Pfaff’s saloon and were regulars. Drawing off his experiences there, Whitman included a cluster of poems (known collectively as ‘Calamus’) in his third edition of The Leaves of Grass published in May of 1860. As a group, these poems are wild erotic celebrations of the human form (both male and female) and their unlimited capacity for love. Calamus number 29 is outstanding for its tenderness and intimacy, as well as its fearless depiction of a gay partnership.

Written by Jason Eisner, Tenement Museum Education Manager for Exhibitions and Coordination

Related Reading and Sources: 

• Rebel Souls, Walt Whitman and America’s First Bohemians, Justin Martin, 2014, Merlord Lawrence Book Group 

• Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman, 3rd Edition, 1860, 150th Anniversary Facsimie Edition, University of Iowa Press 

Photo credits:

• Schneider’s Saloon, recreated at 97 Orchard Street for the Tenement Museum tour “Shop Life”

• Lager Bier Chromo-lithograph, 1879, Mensing and Stecher Lithographic Company of Rochester NY, Library of Congress

• Bohemians in Pfaff’s, Illustrated by Frank Bellew, February 6, 1864, Demorest’s New York Illustrated News

• American poet Walt Whitman. This image was made in 1887 in New York, by photographer George C. Cox.