Monk’s Café (264 S. 16th St.) owner Tom Peters just shot out an email announcing that the Belgian bar is again open for business.  The back bar room will open in a week or so, when construction on the building’s fire tower is complete.  After the jump, Peters’ email and a synopsis of the tragic event that required the evacuation of the building’s 13 tenants and the closure of the restaurant.

We are OPEN!   The City of Philadelphia told us that we could open our doors at 11:30 AM today.  All the City officials that we dealt with were amazingly helpful.  So we want to give a big thanks to Bart, Scott, Mrs. Ward and everyone else for their extraordinary efforts.  Philadelphia Rocks!

The workmen our landlord hired worked long hours to get us reopened.  Our landlord has been on-site for 20 hours each day…seriously.  He has spared no expense getting the apartments back up to code in as expeditious a manner as possible.

For those few that are not aware of what occurred, I’ll give the Cliff Notes version of the events.  But first I’d like to make it totally clear that we do NOT own the building.  We are tenants in the building, just as are the apartment dwellers upstairs.

1. Near the end of our Saturday evening’s business (just before our 2AM closing time), one of the upstairs tenants fell from the fire escape tower.  He had a third floor apartment and he and a friend apparently were leaning on a metal railing when it gave way.  They both fell several stories.  He died and she miraculously is already out of the hospital.  We are devastated about what happened.   Our landlord knew the gentleman that fell.  He is also heart broken.

2. Philadelphia Department of License & Inspection decided to close the building until a structual engineer could do an inspection and certify that the building was safe.  They also required our landlord to update the safety systems in the entire building.

3. The landlord has already received the engineer’s certification, but updating the apartment section of the safety systems will take several more days.  The restaurant portion of the building is already approved.

Since our back bar area’s emergency exit is under the apartment’s fire escape tower, we cannot open the back bar today.  We expect the landlord to have everything finished by next Friday.  When his work is done, we will be able to open the back bar to the public.

The Front Bar and the Front Two Dining Rooms are Open!  The Ktichen is Open!

Hopefully that information answers most of your questions.  Thank you all for your support during this very difficult time.  We hope to see you soon.

Tom Peters

Monk’s is back in business

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Closings, Openings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.