Also this issue: Icepack -A.D. Amorosi

April 17-23, 2003

naked city

firstlook

Photo By: Michael T. Regan

by A.D. Amorosi

If anyone was a fan of the iconography of ’60s-into-’70s bachelordom, it was I. The swinging askew music trying to keep up with "the times"; the oddly hip/not-hip fashions of after-workers -- Trainor-Norell for the ladies, Pierre Cardin for the men. The corner of 20th and Market was a hub of haute hotness, what with The Swinging Waters Hotel, the Penn City Tavern and the sleek airplane-esque bowling alley. I know because when I was a kid, my dad used to play saxophone at these places. We had a good laugh.

The New City Tavern at 20th and Ludlow flourished during these times, a whiskey-sour respite for the insurance and Stock Exchange crowd that hovered over Market and JFK Boulevard like post-Rat-Packing vultures. "We found photos from that era that would make you scream," says Phoebe Keating, one of the proprietors of what New City Tavern has become: Blue Horseshoe.

Keating and Gina Cabell, of Cuvee Notredame, took over from Pete Antipas, called it Blue Horeshoe and went to work. They stripped NCT to its core to hip it up, Horseshoe style: new, openable café doors that stretch from 20th to Ludlow, a corner of brown mahogany and shiny brickpoint that can become an outdoor café.

Inside, they've turned the place into an open-air mission: wide, breezy, even churchlike in its relationship between space and furnishings. What horseshoes have to do with church and pews I don't know, but you nearly expect doves to fly through. The room is mostly white with tangerine-colored bits, an exhibition kitchen and Rivera-like paintings. Its open windows provide natural lighting and several tiny ceiling spotlights surround the cathedral ceiling.

Throughout the light-blue grotto tile floor is mahogany; a long, winding, curvaceous bar with the very thinnest glass-encrusted back bar and just enough room behind it (and in front of the still-unfinished blue mural) for couples to hang close. The tables and chairs in the center of the room are mixed with pews, which are centered as if for Mass. Each sturdy high-backed saloon seat and dining-room chair is subtly etched with a horseshoe -- a simple signature touch to a quaint, sturdy room that businessmen are already eating up like Caribbean chef Audley Thompson's meals and Gina's Meatloaf.