“You’re not allowed to have a sign,” Mr. Borgognone said, explaining that the building is in the Greenwich Village Historic District, and that the front door is the same heavy wooden one in place when the wall collapsed.  The interior will mix and match old and new. The patterned wallpaper, leather banquettes, French-oak tables, even the long, dark bar — all are new. “What Chumley’s in the ’20s should have looked like,” Mr. Borgognone said.  But the book jackets are back. Chumley’s had a reputation as a hangout for writers — some famous, some not — and no doubt it served its share of literary hangers-on who hoped to overhear what Edna St. Vincent Millay was saying. Or John Dos Passos. Or Jack Kerouac or William S. Burroughs.  The walls at Chumley’s became a gallery for the regulars’ book covers. The collection was removed after the wall collapsed, and the book jackets have now been remounted. Some are originals, some reproductions. There are also larger-than-life portraits of larger-than-life types like Ernest Hemingway, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck.  Some barroom etymologists say the expression “eighty-six” was coined at Chumley’s, whose address is 86 Bedford Street. In the days of Prohibition-era raids, the bartender would magically get word whenever the police were coming. Chumley’s also had an entrance on Barrow Street, and when officers were to rush in that door, the bartender would yell “eighty-six” — meaning, leave through the 86 Bedford Street door.  Sadly, the Oxford English Dictionary gives Chumley’s no such credit for “eighty-six.” Perhaps it’s even sadder that the old Barrow Street door now has an emergency-exit alarm.  “Chumley’s, 20 years ago,” or even as recently as just before the wall collapsed in 2007, “was a bar that served beer,” Mr. Borgognone said. “It wasn’t a place people went to for dinner. We wanted a place you’d be comfortable coming to on a date.”  Maybe there really are no new ideas. If so, the idea of Chumley’s as a place to go on a date is one of them. Michael Kilian, who went on to be a Chicago Tribune correspondent and to write the comic strip “Dick Tracy” with the cartoonist Dick Locher, once explained that he was introduced to Chumley’s in 1957, when he was 18. Chumley’s, he wrote, came well recommended when he was seeking a place to take “a ‘nice girl’ instead of the rattraps I usually patronized.”  “One of the things about Chumley’s that has never changed is that it has continued to attract mostly ‘nice girls,’ ” Mr. Kilian wrote. He mentioned Edna St. Vincent Millay, adding: “You almost never find Courtney Love or Madonna wannabes. I do not believe Barbra Streisand ever darkened the darkened doorway.”  He wrote those passages in 2000, a couple of years before the owner at the time described a distressingly gritty neighborhood scene, with people smoking crack cocaine or having sex in nearby doorways.  And then, that night in 2007, the bartenders locked up for what turned out to be the last time. Days turned into months and months turned into years as repairs dragged on to the little building that housed Chumley’s and to the adjacent structures.  Mr. Borgognone is a latecomer. He entered the picture just last winter, introduced by the contractor of Sushi Nakazawa, who knew Jim Miller, a firefighter who had started as a part-time bartender at Chumley’s and ended up in charge.  “What Chumley’s was missing was a guide,” Mr. Borgognone said. “What I mean is, someone who could say, ‘We’ve built restaurants before. Here’s the first step, here’s how we start.’” Of Mr. Miller, he said, “I think he needed help. He needed someone who wasn’t doing this as a part-time job.” (Mr. Miller did not respond to telephone messages or emails inquiries sent over the last couple of weeks.)  Mr. Borgognone said Chumley’s was facing a tight deadline to build out the interior space before the Buildings Department permits expired, but he plunged in. He said, “Everyone told me the same thing my wife said before Sushi Nakazawa: ‘You’re crazy.’”  Well before Mr. Borgognone stepped in, neighbors tried to stop Chumley’s from reopening, even winning concessions (earlier closing times and a promise to provide security were written into the restaurant’s liquor license). He said they need not worry.  “We don’t do bars where people are drinking in and flopping all over the floor — that’s not our kind of business,” Mr. Borgognone said. As for the neighbors, “Once they understand this is not a problematic establishment and it’s not what they thought, it will be all right. They’ll see.”
The onetime Greenwich Village speakeasy without a sign closed in 2007 after a wall collapsed. Now, with a new operator and an updated décor, it is scheduled to reopen in early September.