Sim(ian) City

Welcome to the monkey house: The royal blue main room (and the adjacent "Baboon's Ass") feels more like a living room than a zoo cage. Photo By: Manuel Dominguez Jr

Rittenhouse Square's Monkey Bar is for chimps and playas alike.

by A.D. Amorosi

When David Carroll opened Magazine on Walnut Street two years ago — with the gorgeous 1920s brownstone's iron gates and its tall windows strewn with wandering Jews — he wanted the white-walled openness of his funky restaurant to be "immediately part of Rittenhouse Square." Visually, it was. But its openness went sadly unappreciated.

Now, John Falcetta, a Carroll pal who owns Medusa, purchased the 600-square-foot location for drinking and lounging purposes — for The Monkey Bar. "We figured that it was tough going making a bistro work on the block," says Monkey Bar General Manager Michael Jordan. "What worked was drinking. So everything had to be geared for that; a great, wide bar where people could pick at food if they wanted to, but mostly to feel comfortable hanging and drinking."

Monkey Bar isn't named after Manhattan's famed location, rather, it was inspired by the old-school shithole colonialism of Boston's Mission Hill-area art-school hang. With walls now painted royal blue against cobalt with white and electric green highlights, the design concept was meant to optimize the room's lack of space by supersizing whatever it could to create greater scale. Oddball accent pieces also heighten the room: French mahogany cashier stands and service bars, metallic hanging stars and long, orange art deco shipboard lights dangling from its 17-foot-high tin ceiling.

"We wanted to keep the integrity of its living room past," says Jordan. So after the room's blue Brit colonialism was set in stone, wood-craftsman, draftsman and local painter Tim Bowen got to work on the bar.

Photo By: Manuel Dominguez Jr

One side of the room is taken up by an 8-foot vintage French poster of a monkey guzzling a bottle of booze (nearly dwarfing its banquettes), and the other side is the bar. Literally. The back bar is a long mirror fronted by shelves with Victorian-looking columns and arches ("but like Cape May Victorian," jokes Bowen), and the bar itself is massive and beautiful. Extending some 16 feet across the room, the dark blue base with light-green pine trim is topped with Italian black marble for a high-gloss, daunting look. "It's all bar, just that and an aisle running through the room," says Bowen, who extended what he had originally created for Magazine into what is, in effect, a room with its seating pushed against the walls for the sake of wideness.

The bar curves inward at the end, inviting, or rather pointing, you toward the evil back room. Cut out from where its kitchen used to be, this red room (I'll christen it the Baboon's Ass) features red painted walls, black leather banquettes, hanging pin lights, a wall of bamboo slats, a black carpet on refinished parquet floors, monkey prints, and photos of King Kong. Oh, and a monkey mural.

That's where Jake Henry comes in. His Red Room mural surrounded with gilded gold leaf is his hysterical take on Planet of The Apes. "It's Taylor kissing Dr. Zira, which we thought would be apt for the make-out room," says Jordan. Then there's the main room's mural of a large gorilla holding a cocktail glass. Still unfinished, the monkey-work-in-progress mural will soon find itself competing with spires, bi-winged planes and such. "Monkeys at play, monkeys at work, monkeys kissing; that's us," says Jordan.

2029 Walnut St., 215-557-0296

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there