Situated directly beneath the Seneca Avenue Subway platform, Pinky’s Bar is located within a mid-century townhouse in Ridgewood Queens with a time capsule bar on the ground floor, which the original owners extended and built out to cover the entire lot. 

Now under new ownership after almost twenty years of abandonment, Pinky’s aims to retain the original character of the original bar while updating finishes, layout, and systems to meet the present day. Our approach was to develop a system of parallel finishes to the original 1950’s material palette: Low Carbon Twins. We used recycled clay tile in lieu of asbestos flooring, cork wall panels for beadboard, and recycled resin sheeting for fiberglass soffits, with glass block accents to match the existing windows. 

The back room required more significant interventions to cover deteriorating lot-line double-hung windows and a leaky, sagging roof: re-cast as the “red room”, it features a linoleum-clad gazebo, an elevated stage for music, open mics, and karaoke, with a resin and homasote shroud pointed at the elevated subway tracks above.