O Pioneer!

[263 Bowery, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for an enormous view.]

The Pioneer Restaurant makes a brief appearance in A.J. Liebling's “Bowery Boom,” in Back Where I Come From (1938):

Five cents pays for a shave at the barber college. For 20 cents the Boweryite may have “shave, massage, shampoo, singe and hair tonic,” just like a 46th Street bookmaker. Ten cents will buy “pig snouts, vegetables, potatoes and coffee, bread or rolls,” at the Pioneer Restaurant, 263, and 15 cents will buy an even more elaborate spread at Minder’s Restaurant.

If you click on the photograph, you’ll be able to read at least most of the Pioneer menu. And you’ll be able to better see three ghosts.

This tax photograph reminds me of Berenice Abbott’s 1935 photograph of the Blossom Restaurant at 103 Bowery. There’s also a 1937 Abbott photograph of a Pioneer Restaurant on West Third Street (64, not 60 as the page with the photograph says). The tax photograph of that corner shows the Pure Food Restaurant. Perhaps the Pioneer had moved to the Bowery by the time the Liebling wrote that piece. Or perhaps the Pioneer on West Third was a Bowery sibling, or an unrelated establishment.

In 2007, the building at 263 Bowery was still recognizable as itself. By 2011, everything had changed.

Here, before we leave the Bowery, is a barber school, 15¢ for a shave and a haircut.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[Post title with apologies to Walt Whitman and Willa Cather.]