Ken Silver wants things to feel familiar when customers step into Jim's for the first time in almost two years.
"We tried to keep this side as (close) as possible," Silver, the owner of the cheesesteak shop, said Thursday as he walked over to sleek first-floor counter where staffers will take orders. "We kept the counters here for stand-up eating. We kept the original front door, we didn't change that.
"Certain things we couldn't do, but if you remember what this looked like, this is pretty much it."
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It's taken 21 months of work to get Jim's looking the way it did back in 2022, when a two-alarm fire ripped through the South Street building. Though no one was injured and the structure survived, the damage was extensive. Silver had originally hoped to open last June, then October. Now, he's finally preparing to reopen on Wednesday, May 1, at 4 p.m.
Much may be the same, but some things are a little different. The most obvious change is the scale. Jim's added 1,900 square feet to its shop over the course of renovations when Silver acquired the building next door. That space was the former home of Eye's Gallery, a showcase for Latin American folk art run by Julia Zagar, which relocated to 327 South St. in 2023. Julia is the wife of artist Isaiah Zagar, whose colorful murals adorn numerous buildings in South Philadelphia and the entire Magic Gardens space. His pieces now feature heavily in the new Jim's.
Some of them, like the mosaics along the ceiling of a ground floor entrance, are new works. Customers who look up along the facade will spy a crocodile and tiles reading, "Ken Silver rebuilds Jim's Steaks," "Our neighbor," "Sold Ken" and "2022," the year of the fire.
Much of the Zagar art in the upstairs dining rooms is older, and newly restored with the help of staffers at the Magic Gardens. Some of it had been covered for years — since the '80s, the people at Magic Gardens guess — before the work of combining the old Eye's Gallery with Jim's began.
"This room had a lot of water damage," Silver explained while stepping into a space completely covered in painted tiles and glass, with sunlight streaming in from the skylights. About half of it, he said, was the common outdoor walls to the building behind Jim's at 606 S. Fourth Street, which the Zagars also once owned. "It was drywalled and framed. So when we came in, the skylights were all messed up, the ceilings messed up. We came in and took down all the drywall and that was just there covered up."
The Magic Gardens restored the existing pieces and Zagar drew up a design to cover the rest of the room. If diners can't snag a coveted seat in that dining space, they can also move onto a smaller alcove on the same floor with similar Zagar flair, or another room that will be lined with Jim's old autographed celebrity photos. Tony Bennett survived the fire, Silver said, but some jazz greats sadly did not.
"We lost a Jimmy Buffett, but we had a couple of them, so that was okay," Silver joked.
Jim's will continue to cater to the late-night crowd when it resumes operations, closing at 1 a.m. on Sundays through Thursdays and 3 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. There are still no fryers, and you still can't swipe a credit card to pay for your cheesesteak. Also returning for the relaunch is the shop's original staff, who were the recipients of a crowdfunding effort in the days after the fire.
"Everybody that you see here," Silver said, gesturing to his employees putting the finishing touches on the space, "Was here the day of the fire. Anybody who wanted to come back, came back. As I told a lot of people, if they found something better or that they liked better, less stressful, you know, I'm all about that. But we wanted everybody back, so we're happy that we're having as many people back as we got."
Other new additions to Jim's include a production hub in the basement, first floor seating and a gift shop stand that will hawk Jim's hats, shirts and koozies. It'll also sell copies of a book from the Magic Gardens that showcases the old Eye's Gallery. Flipping through the pages, customers will recognize pieces that now adorn the cheesesteak shop's walls, possibly affixed right above the table where they can finally bite into one of the Jim's trademark steaks, at long last.
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