Jim’s Steaks on South Street is reopening soon: What you need to know

When Jim’s Steaks burned down in July 2022, it left two holes on South Street.

One was the physical hole — the shell of the eatery that had been serving cheesesteaks since 1976. The other, said president Ken Silver, was spiritual — a void in the once-popular shopping district. Jim’s South St. Steaks & Hoagies, as it is formally known, drew about a million unique visitors a year to its corner at Fourth and South Streets, according to the South Street Headhouse District.

Within a year or so of the fire, a neighboring restaurant, a jewelry store, and two ice cream parlors closed. “I didn’t realize the impact that Jim’s had on the street as a whole until we weren’t here,” Silver said.

May 1 is the target date for Jim’s reopening, Silver said.

The new space combines Jim’s original footprint with Eye’s Gallery, the folk-art store next door owned by artist Isaiah Zagar and his wife, Julia, which was also heavily damaged in the fire. (The Zagars, who opened Eye’s in 1968, have relocated to 327 South St., a half-block away.)

Jim’s will house a number of large-scale glass-and-tile mosaics by Zagar, who created the nearby Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens: an original mural in the dining room, as well as a piece, created five decades ago, that was uncovered during renovations.

» READ MORE: Locals see signs of rebirth for South Street

A few things remain unchanged: No fried food. Cash only. The staff. Many who had been working elsewhere during the repairs, Silver said, will be back. Prices, however, have not been set.

With the combined real estate of 400 and 402 South St. — an engineering challenge, given that each address comprised three separate buildings dating to the late 1800s — Jim’s will gain a full floor of ground-floor seating to complement its second-floor dining room, which is now ADA-compliant. In addition to new dining rooms on the upper floors, a second staircase means that customers no longer have to awkwardly squeeze past each other as they ascend and descend. One of the rooms, which can be cordoned off for private parties, contains some of Zagar’s earliest mosaics.

There will be a takeout window open till 3 a.m. Friday and Saturday — Jim’s will be open till 1 a.m. on other days — while a retail counter will sell Jim’s merchandise. Delivery drivers will get their own entrance, on Fourth Street.

Total budget? “I don’t know,” Silver said last week. “I’m still spending money, hand over fist.” He said he’d welcome the idea of “getting back to doing what I love and that’s making cheesesteaks in Philadelphia instead of supervising the rebuilding of my restaurant.”

Jim Perligni (by some accounts, Pearligni) opened his shop at 62nd and Noble Streets in West Philadelphia in 1939. William Proetto bought Jim’s in the 1960s. His lawyer was Abner Silver, who had been growing tired of the profession. Seeing opportunity with the Bicentennial celebrations coming to Philadelphia, they opened a Jim’s at Fourth and South.

The area, known as Fabric Row, was thrown into flux in the 1970s, when plans for a crosstown expressway had been scuttled. The cheap real estate attracted an artsy crowd, and businesses catering to young people, such as Theater of the Living Arts, began moving in.

Silver, who also had a shop called Abner’s at 38th and Chestnut Streets, assumed sole ownership of the location after Proetto died in 2011. The Proetto family, which had an offshoot for a decade in Northeast Philadelphia, controls the Jim’s location in Springfield, Delaware County. It sold off the original building in West Philadelphia, now known as Jim’s West and operated by Cortez Johnson and Victoria Wylie-Landers.

Ken Silver, a son of Abner Silver, assumed the presidency of the corporation that controls Jim’s on South Street in 2015, when his father died.