Also this issue:

The New Old School
Vintage clothing finds a second (or third, or fifth) life as haute couture.
-A.D. Amorosi

Icepack
-A.D. Amorosi

May 1- 7, 2003

naked city

firstlook: Samba

Photo By: Michael T. Regan

by A.D. Amorosi

Turning a big old bank into a club -- that we’ve seen. Rococo. Revival. The Bank. It’s when a club goes back, metaphorically, to the bank, that we worry.

There's always been something unique about the Girard National Bank at the corner of Seventh and Girard. The decaying building, built in 1870, looks like a Masonic temple, a Lutheran church or Monticello, depending on where you're looking. In recent years, the place was tattered and trashed with drop ceilings and crumbling walls.

That is until Joe Hamideh and Mike Maruhn turned it into what they see as a traditional (non-themey) Brazilian nightclub -- Samba. No parakeets. No palm trees. Instead, the duo made Samba a stately affair, from its blinking neon sign outside to its sandy colors indoors. Hamideh and Maruhn (with family and friends) have stripped the bank to its original high ceilings (over 50 feet) and thrown up silken yellow shades of paint. Enter and you're greeted by Brazilian paintings in the monastery-like foyer. You can peek into the main room and dancefloor from the entry, with tables and chairs for eating "rodizio," a traditional Brazilian meal of sausages, quail, lamb, fish, beef and pork that Hamideh says "you must come hungry for." You can see the parquet dancefloor, facing a full-length mirrored wall a la Saturday Night Fever. But you can't really sense the immenseness of Samba until you step fully inside. There's even an Amazon-inspired waterfall encased in rock, drizzling down from ceiling to dancefloor. (It wasn't on yet. But it was there.) The red and yellow balcony hangs over the longest bar, made of dark mahogany and white tile with old-school red barstools.

This mix of Braziliana and barroom Americana leads to the back bar. Its long windows are boarded up and blacked out with mahogany slats and hand-carved Indian partitions Hamideh won at auction. While this darkened effect seems to offer total privacy for quiet nights, the over-6,000-square-foot space (and they haven't even touched the basement yet) also offers Samba patrons the hothouse feel, community, food, music and mood of a Brazilian nightclub.

Samba, 714 W. Girard Ave., 215-625-7900.