Mark'd with a Bee

N. 3rd's impresario puts his stamp on the reborn Silk City.

by A.D. Amorosi

STING OPERATION: Mark Bee in his refurbished Silk City. Photo By: Michael T. Regan (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Corny as it may sound Mark Bee's a queen bee and a worker bee.

A queen bee: because in his capacity as owner/operator of N. 3rd Bee's lead the charge to make Northern Liberties a dining, hanging locale and hosted a team of troubleshooting/troublemaking artists and chefs like Scott Johnston, Christa D'Agostino and Peter Dunmire to aid him in that quest.

A worker bee: because rather than have someone else do the dirty work, Bee — the general contracting scion of master plumber John Bee — has always been the first guy in the trenches. Literally.

When Bee bought Silk City last April — the long-heralded diner and bar (and someday-soon beer garden) he reopened last week — he let Johnston have all the fun doing mosaics. "Man, it was disgusting in here; the pipes, the kitchen," says Bee who pretty much ripped out and put back everything from wires to pipes. "That bar?" says Bee, pointing out the main room's lengthy saloon slab newly refurbished. "The bottom of it had rotted out."

"Mark wanted a restaurant, not a bar," says Johnston. "Silk has a brand new kitchen from the basement up."

The new Silk City is a mosaic wonderland that includes giant mirrored champagne glassworks, tiled superheroes and Star Wars pieces in each of the five new bathrooms, and the broken china cup 'n' plate reverie that lines the archway from the diner into the bar. Even the red, white and blue-painted steps leading from the bar to the diner are meant to look mosaic-y.

"That's Scott all the way, man; laid on his belly to get every square just right," says Bee of the artist and wild-maned buddy who lives in his house — the one right in back of Silk City, the one next door to his dad's house. "Yeah, I'm my dad and mine's own nuisance bar."

At 44 ("I'm really 34, but 10 years of experience aged me," he jokes), Bee has taken over the literal cornerstone of Northern Liberties as his 200-feet-long, 50-feet-deep, block-length new enterprise is the borderline between Spring Garden and everything north. It's a hell of a chunk of real estate he's bought. When you figure in N. 3rd and the apartments above it and several other storefronts Bee owns, there's a commitment to Northern Liberties he'll proudly never outrun. "Think of this [area] before 1991," says Bee. "There was nothing here."

When the Bees moved here in 1980, it was a rough neighborhood.

Silk City was still DeeDee's Diner — a truck stop that closed by 3:30 p.m. The bar was nothing but a hole serving booze breakfast and liquid lunch.

The Bees were a Kensington-born (B Street and Allegheny Avenue) family who lived for a spell in Atlantic City and Margate (Mark went to Holy Spirit High School in A.C.) before returning to Philly and new digs below Spring Garden.

"Actually I went to a vo-tech in Margate," says the bearded Bee, with a grin, about specializing in the most dangerous but profitable brand of plumbing: underground stuff. "I figured college would've been wasted on me."

Bee's prone to these self-deprecating remarks, calling people he knows and works with smarter. Sorry, Bee. No one who's bought up large chunks of Northern Liberties at the prices you did is a dummy. Besides, he's got brains and brawn, having learned plumbing from some of the city's best — not only his grandfather, uncles and cousins, but his dad, John, 72, a master plumber since age 21. Still, Bee got bored and branched out into general contracting work, property development and landlording.

A foray into the restaurant biz was just one more step for him — not just in terms of business but a sort of personal metamorphosis. "People misread Mark," says Johnston. "It's a game he plays. He has very sophisticated tastes, and has traveled the world taking stock in exactly what works for other restaurants."

Bee has a plumber's hands, an aesthete's soul and a foodie's palate. He bought the very run-down 801 N. Third St. space in 1999 and opened it and its five apartments as the cavernous restaurant N. 3rd a month after 9/11. Bee contracted and plumbed through N. 3rd's first year, then hung up his tool belt — save for his own ventures and the occasional pal's problem. "I just snaked Owen Kamihira's new system at Bar Ferdinand," says Bee. "The mussel- and clamshells kept getting stuck."

Bee liked Silk City. He knew, like co-owner Paul Devitt did when he opened Silk in 1991, that the name represented not only Pat-erson, N.J.'s dedication to sleek silver-bullet diner manufacturing but to the silk industry that also came out of Paterson and that fabric's potential for garish design. Devitt's Silk City was likewise awash in velvet and kitschy Vegas lustre.

"Bee definitely wanted to keep its Vegas feel," says Johnston

Bee hated that it fell into disrepair. "It was a mess. But it was a piece of American history." So just under $2 million dollars later Bee bought the bricks, liquor license and parking lot from Greg Precht and his partners. Bee bought the rivets in Silk's doorway too. But somebody popped them. "That's like stealing the hood ornament off a Cadillac," says Bee. "But I'll have some made."

Bee's making a lot of stuff for his Silk City. No, he wasn't ever going to change the name. ("My ego's not big enough to call it Bee's Diner.") And despite owning several storefronts in NoLibs, N. 3rd and Silk City are it for him, restaurant-wise. "It wouldn't be fair to these places. Besides they're too much fun on their own."

But Bee has turned Silk into a slick sensation that, when it's dark, glows red from within all the way through the bar and looks like a spaceship from across the street. He's fashioned new black padded leather doors with portholes for the bar and knuckled chrome fountain taps for the diner's beers and given chef Dunmire (yanked from N. 3rd) a gorgeous place to braise Thai ribs, broil pork chops (with applesauce) and fashion delish veggie fare: diner food spiked with flare. "And done with love," says Bee, seriously.

Inside, without the glow, the walls of Silk's bar are blood-red, black and gold and covered by velvet portraits of the Peek-A-Boo Revue that Johnston and D'Agostino share. Plus Johnston painted Bee's girlfriend/Silk manager Indira Torres as an angel in a sequin bra — backlit on glass no less. There're a few paintings done by "R. Horsebutt," aka Jim Reed, brother of Standard Tap co-owner William Reed. Bee chopped up Silk's old mint-colored tables and turned them into shelves while lining the diner with racing-stripe leather booths and scratched metal/Formica tabletops. Johnston did a million things — the fun-house doors and the patriotic swordfish hung above them ("My dad caught that like 20 years ago," says Bee); reconfigured broken-glass Marilyn Monroe mirrors; silly signs like "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing." And Bee is readying, along with a Thursday-through-Sunday slate of DJs including Steven Bloodbath, Opal and Deejay, a stage for once ("maybe twice") weekly live rendezvous from D'Agostino's floor show to pal Amos Lee to bartender Rich Kaufman to Martha Graham Cracker.

This from a guy who started as a plumber. "I love doing it all — your roof, your hot-water heater. Then I'll pick out the right color for the curtains, baby," says Bee with a loud laugh. "I just keep plunging forward."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Silk City Diner, Fifth and Spring Garden sts., 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. ( food from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m.), 10 a.m. weekend brunch beginning mid-July, 215-592-8838.