BY DENNIS LYNCH | Bedford St.’s legendary watering hole Chumley’s opened its heavy wooden door to a crowd of eager patrons this month after its nine-year absence in the West Village. The new owners completely rebuilt the old bar such that it more resembles itself on the first day Leland Chumley opened up in 1922 than it did in 2007 when a renegade chimney next door fell through its dining room and nearly shuttered the place for good.
The Villager visited the new Chumley’s on its first Friday in business and, naturally, it was packed. The crowd was a mix of middle-aged professionals in suits, recovering bohemians there for the bar’s literary history, and gray-haired patrons this reporter hoped had a long history with the bar and would talk to me about it.
Luckily, one did. Bill Briggs discovered Chumley’s in the 1950s at the height of the bar’s popularity with the Beat writers. He, like many others, had a tough time back then first finding the bar, which is famous for its lack of exterior signage.
“Someone told me about it,” Briggs said. “It was hard, but I found it.”
Back then it was a laid-back joint with reasonably priced food and drinks, not like the fancy “destination” bar like some of the ritzy joints Uptown, he recalled.
With $16 cocktails and a $25 double cheeseburger, on the menu, the new Chumley’s certainly feels more like those Uptown joints Briggs spoke of, but the old-timer shrugged off the notion that the bar has lost all its magic.
“At first, it felt a little too clean,” he said. “But you know it fell down and they had to do what they had to do, I understand. But they kept a lot of the books and things — the ghost is still around.”
Some folks had less forgiving opinions about the bar’s transformation from divey literary haunt to haute gastropub. One patron who frequented the old Chumley’s in the 1990s sitting at the bar called it “pissy,” and the antithesis of what he liked about the old bar. He added that the team behind the new place did a “beautiful job” overhauling it, but he didn’t plan to come back often. Others made their objections clear in the comment sections of Internet articles and on social media.
The ponytailed man that sat next to Briggs at the bar was on the opposite end of the spectrum. He is the person largely responsible for preserving what connection the new bar has to the old one, beside its physical location. Official Chumley’s archivist James DiPaola can usually be found there and is more than happy to, in his words, “infect people with this knowledge” of the bar. He started coming to the historic watering hole in the 1990s. Back then, he volunteered to care for and document the portraits of author-patrons who once brooded in the dark booths, their framed books jackets that lined the wall, and the countless other knickknacks that made Chumley’s famous.
DiPaola was at the bar when the chimney collapsed in 2007 and turned his preservationist mission into more of a rescue operation. When it became clear the Department of Buildings and other agencies weren’t going to let Chumley’s open without completely overhauling the century-old building’s structure, DiPaola carted out the artifacts with the hopes they’d eventually find their way back to 86 Bedford St.
When the time came, he rehung those photos of Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and dozens of other Chumley’s regulars of yesteryear and put their book jackets back on the wall under glass cases. He hung Lee Chumley’s portrait over the fireplace.
Chumley’s, as many knew over the last few decades, was “sort of falling apart,” DiPaola said. The book jackets had degraded and the walls sagged. Many patrons loved that shabby charm, but it simply wasn’t sustainable after the chimney collapse, he said.
“The old Chumley’s was nothing but four walls — what mattered was the people in it,” he said. “This is an opportunity to renew that cycle. Lee Chumley didn’t build the bar that it looked like in 2001, 70 years did that. Its this or nothing and if there was nothing, they’d have nothing to complain about.”
And it almost was nothing. Besides the mountain of structural work impeding Chumley’s return, a group of neighbors fought a long legal battle to keep the bar shuttered. They were concerned the tavern would bring “unwanted business” to the area, which was already “oversaturated” with bars, according to their lawyer.
Of course, they failed and on Friday night “unwanted business” packed 86 Bedford. Some had heard about an upscale bar opening in the Village and had not been to the old bar. Others had been to the old bar and wanted — and in some cases, felt obligated — to see what the new place was all about.
A young couple drinking wine at a table in the packed bar room were part of that latter group. They came hopefully to get some dinner, but it wasn’t looking good for them. There is a 30-day wait list to get a table and have white-vested waiters bring you chef Victoria Blamey’s classed-up American fare. Still, they were happy to be back at a bar they never expected to reopen.
“We never would have made the effort to come this weekend if we didn’t have any attachment to the place,” Ryan Auer said. “Who holds onto reopening dreams for nine years? Who has that long of a plan, especially in New York? That is unique, that is rare.”
As it turns out, it was their lucky day. Restaurateur Alessandro Borgognone, the place’s new owner, decided he liked Auer and sat him and his fiancée Jennie Conner at a table before he sat for a short interview with me. Borgognone, who owns the massively successful Sushi Nakazawa around the corner on Barrow St., said the Chumley’s phones were ringing off the hook as soon they started taking reservations in September.
There’s “nothing crazy, no fusion” on the menu, Borgognone said — it’s mostly “classic American dishes,” that match the classy, speakeasy atmosphere.
“We wanted something that would complement the space,” he said. “You can see a beef tartare being on the menu, and you see an amazing burger on the menu. While we walked through the space, we said this is what the space feels like and this is what the space deserves.”
From the classed-up menu, level floors and walls and decor — in almost all respects, and for better or for worse, Chumley’s is clearly a different place than it was for Bill Briggs and the decades-worth of others who spent nights there over the last century.
For those who bemoan that its new style will just attract tourists and “dude bros,” as one Internet commenter put it, they can take solace that the one thing that hasn’t changed about Chumley’s may keep some of the uninitiated away. When I walked out the door to head home, I saw three furrow-browed men looking at their phones, then up, then walk to the corner of Barrow and Bedford Sts., then back, still looking at their phones. Guess what bar they couldn’t find?
