Pizza With Everything

LAS VEGAS â€”  To step out of the gritty desert glare and into the cool dimness of New York City Pizza is to fall into a wonderland of misspent youth.

You are greeted by a vacant stare from a suit of armor standing guard over a shopworn Galaxy 200 jukebox belting out Big Brother and the Holding Company’s greatest hits.

Your eyes adjust to the darkness as you grope toward an empty table, and then you see it: the walls and ceilings coming alive in a riot of street signs, military signs, campy old advertisements, kitschy Tiffany-style lamps, giant bottles, theater lobby posters (“The Day the Earth Caught Fire�) and, seemingly, one of every liquor and beer sign ever made.

A big-screen TV is a light show of strangely incongruous images: soaring teenagers on motocross bikes fading to turn-of-the-century flying machines struggling to take off. ESPN’s headline baseball game flickers mutely on a tiny antique black-and-white set.

This improbable tableau, which is little-known south of the Luxor hotel, is the lifework of Tim Ingstad, the brother of TV personality / pitchman Shadoe Stevens. In his youth, Ingstad was a rock musician and a local disc jockey with a morning show on KENO-AM.

“We try to take everybody back to their college days,� says Ingstad, who serves draft beer in 1-pint Mason jars. The tiny four-chair bar is nearly hidden behind a pair of video poker machines--the sole concession to Nevada’s pervading pastime and industry.

Ingstad opened the quirky folk-museum-cum-kitchen 15 years ago at 1553 N. Eastern Ave. in what had been a juice lounge for ex-alcoholics. Into it, he emptied his overflowing attic full of the random Americana he has collected over decades of garage-sale crawling.

NYC Pizza is iconic among locals as a refuge from the meticulously themed mega-entertainment venues a few miles away.

Ingstad claims 16 annual best-pizza awards from a local newspaper. But for guests who tarry to study the signs and oddball news clippings shellacked into tabletops, who watch the lava lamps and silent movies, who listen to the scratchy Jefferson Airplane tracks while sipping from Mason jars, the attraction is a chance to slip back into some long-vanished daydream.

“There’s an artfulness here that would just look like junk if anybody else tried it,� Ingstad boasts.

Off in an alcove, photographer Mark Lewis is shooting four guys and a sultry-looking young woman who are relaxing by candlelight. They are the members of Mama Zeus, an up-and-coming local rock band and 1960s reincarnation. They’re here not to perform, but to commune with their muse.

“This place has the greatest backgrounds,� Lewis says, adjusting his tripod for another shot.