John Bower is thinking about Ridgewood. “There’s a lack of pretension, which really stands out to me. There’s a sort of authenticity to it,” he reports back.

“I love it, it feels like a proper neighborhood.” He’s had his eye on this neighborhood since about 2021, when a realtor started selling him on a long-dead spot right under the rattling of the M line. Before thinking about the quiet neighborhood in Queens, the one-time political consultant (“2010 is when I gave up on having a real job, officially”) was working on the west coast, running a whiskey bar out in Pasadena called Blind Donkey. That’s still there. But now, he’s here, behind an impressive glass wall, where he has stationed a new bar called Mr. Nancy’s, named after a bartender’s cat.  

The spot has been “sitting fallow since 2004,” attests Michael, a bartender from the Blind Donkey who has also pulled up his entire life to operate suddenly out of Ridgewood. Before that, he says he lived in Echo Park for twelve years and before that, Guerneville in Northern California. (“It’s like a gay resort town near the Russian River,” he says.) In fact, Michael tells me, he now lives upstairs, which adds a sort of folksy charm to this new-reoccupied space. At one distant point – “It’s been closed for as long as I can remember and I’ve lived here my whole life. I knew once Ridgewood really started getting gentrified someone would be dying to get that place because of the glass exterior” claims some random guy on reddit – it had been a spot purportedly called Young’s Tavern, operated by “an Italian family that had the spot since 1920,” says Michael. In the back, he discovered a framed black-and-white photo of a group, the Ridgewood Rod & Gun Club, taken on July 9, 1967, dominated primarily by children, who look as if at a summer camp.

“It looked like something out of a Martin Scorsese film,” when he opened its long-closed doors, Bower recalls. They then hired an upscale architect to redesign the place, who delivered “a system of parallel finishes to the original 1950’s material palette,” according to the firm’s website. They kept the wall of windows that have overlooked the street for perhaps decades; the walls of the bar itself, however, the architect had filled with vaguely drinking-related ephemera beyond the imagination of a little Italian family. Bower points to the metal cylinder lights, which glow like thick metal cigars, busily illuminating a particularly modernist law library. “They turned us on to these lights. That was their find,” he says. 

Among other innovations, they’ve converted a payphone into a small table that can hold drinks. The back of the bar, they also converted into a space with more tables that can hold more drinks. Bower has also whipped up a small bar menu involving various kinds of hot dogs, chili dogs et. al. & the group has already booked a group of comedians to make apperences there two Wednesdays a month. “They’re really funny people,” Michael assures me.  

Mr. Nancy is located at 7-02 Seneca Avenue, right under the Seneca M station. Keep up with its hours on Instagram.

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Photos taken by Andrew Karpan.