This Bar Has A History

The bar at the center of this room was rescued from a place called Makar's, in Bayonne. We pulled her out of a building where she'd sat closed for twenty years and brought her down to 53 Baldwin. It took about a month to refabricate her to fit the space.

As the family's grandson tells it, Makar's opened in October 1959. The founders had been running a tattoo business in New York, where tattooing women was illegal at the time, and got arrested for doing it anyway. So they crossed into Bayonne and opened a bar instead. Women weren't allowed in bars in New Jersey then either. When the cops came around to push the matriarch out, she told them she owned the place. She wasn't going anywhere, and they couldn't make her.

Most businesses in Bayonne in those years wouldn't cash paychecks for the Black dockworkers. Makar's would.

She came to us with the cigarette burns still in her. Decades of them and each one has a hidden story to tell. We left them where they were.

The Room

53 Baldwin Avenue sits inside the 1894 Borden's Condensed Milk Factory, on the corner of Baldwin and Montgomery in McGinley Square. The building once helped feed the world. The same corner now holds three businesses under the same ownership: Café Alyce at 641 Montgomery, where we built the kitchen-driven brunch-through-dinner concept first. The Wanderer at 53 Baldwin, the bar you're reading about. One World Pizza at 49 Baldwin, the pizzeria Food & Wine recently named one of the country's nine hottest.

The Wanderer didn't start as The Wanderer. We opened as Bar Alyce, an extension of the café next door, with the antique lamps and tables we already had on hand. It fit the budget. It didn't fit the neighborhood. McGinley Square wasn't looking for a precious extension of a café, it was looking for a bar. So we rebuilt it.

What we ended up with is a room that feels a little worn in and well-traveled. Like a middle-aged Hemingway, somewhere on a long trip. The portrait wall is part our own photography, part old Life magazine clippings, part Playboy ads, part ads from somewhere or other. The hallway and bathroom are wallpapered with travel photographs from around the world. There's a derelict road sign in the hallway too, pointing the way to McGinley Square and Journal Square. Death & Co, Meehan's, and a stack of recipe books live behind the bar. Working bars keep working books.