A Reporter Walks Into A Bar…
Late nights and early mornings at the Irish Haven
By Clara McMichael
People come to drink at the Irish Haven for all sorts of reasons. Some come because it’s the only local watering hole in Sunset Park, that is, if you’re looking for more than a Corona and a taco, as one woman said. Some say they’re guilty Catholics. Others come because, they say, they can trace their Irish ancestry back to the potato famine and so talk nostalgically about a hazy past that was not really theirs.
The Irish Haven, at 58th Street and Fourth Avenue, is a holdout from a time when Sunset Park was Irish and Scandinavian — not predominantly Chinese and Hispanic as it is today. To passersby, the bar is nondescript — identifiable only by smokers huddled around the entrance and an Irish flag which hangs limp on humid days.
The inside of the bar isn’t any more notable, except when you enter and lose sense of which decade you’re in. Green lights cast a murky glow over the counter and the bar emanates a perpetual scent of lemon disinfectant. Elton John plays on the jukebox. The walls are decorated with newspaper clippings, commemorations of firefighters who died on 9/11, and a poster from the Departed, the movie in which one scene was shot at the Irish Haven. The poster is scribbled with autographs from such stars as Jack Nicholson. Sometimes the toilet leaks. A man crouches under a table in the corner to escape from a woman he was dancing with earlier.
No one refused to talk to me the first time I went to the Irish Haven, but they would later, when they learned I was going to write about them. They were confused about my interest in the bar, and accused me “bad etiquette” via text message, though never explaining why, precisely, writing about their bar was bad. Some of them are shadowy — reticent to tell me things that seem unimportant, reluctant to reveal their names, possessive of the bar in ways that were difficult for me to understand.
Most people come to the Irish Haven because they live the next street over, or in the same building or around the corner. There are outliers — a man from Staten Island sips a midday beer at the bar. A woman from Queens comes to visit her friend who lives locally. People have been known to travel from as far as Boston to visit the Haven, just to have a cranberry juice, the way Leonardo DiCaprio’s character did in The Departed. But oftentimes, they’ve been living in Sunset Park their whole lives.
John Murray, the son of Irish immigrants, remembers the days in 1940s and 50s when the Irish Haven was an ice cream parlor. He would walk from his home in Bay Ridge to get a cone, even though the neighborhood around the Haven was rougher than his block. He was one of the “preppy” Irish kids — they lived up in Bay Ridge as opposed to the “tough” ones who lived in what is now Sunset Park. I’ve run into him a couple of times on Tuesday nights when he goes to get a cheap beer (the canned beer, not the $5 Guinness on tap) and to watch baseball.
Along with second or third generation immigrants, there are also people at the bar who were born and raised in Ireland or the U.K. Online reviews of the Irish Haven fixate on the traditional lilts and brogues of the clientele or bartenders who have frequented the Haven for years since emigrating. Some younger customers are directly from Ireland, and they excite the other bar-goers with their authenticity.
Others don’t have as direct of a link to their Irish roots. Luke Boyd, 29, has lived in Sunset Park for the past two years after the rent got too steep in Manhattan. He commutes back to Manhattan for his job in the education department at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. He comes to the Haven a couple times a month, but that’s not as often as he’d like.
“It still feels,” he said, “like a secret.”
Boyd is third generation (or maybe fourth, he’s not certain) Irish on his mother’s side, and sixth (or seventh) generation on his father’s side. His family, he says, immigrated to the United States during the potato famine.
“I’ve always been drawn to Irish pubs,” said Boyd.
He isn’t the only one who feels this way. Paul — who vehemently declined to give his last name — lives in Sunset Park, but is originally from Florida. He’s been a patron of the Irish Haven for the past five years.
“I always end up in Irish bars,” Paul said, attributing it to “Catholic guilt.”
Then there is Seth Keal, a documentary filmmaker who lives in Sunset Park and has some Irish ancestry but wasn’t born in New York. He recommended I listen to The Chieftains’ tribute album to Irish musician Edward Bunting and spoke about going to Irish clubs in the area, but never being able to enter into the most secretive.
The owners of the Irish Haven know that they attract people who crave connection to their Irish heritage.
“There are some people that come to the bar who have Irish roots but they’re not fully connected or aware of those roots,” co-owner Mike Collins said. “An Irish pub is known for being hospitable, and we like to think a lot of people come there because they find it to be hospitable and friendly and open and inviting. And that includes many non-Irish also.”
The building and the bar have been hospitable to Irish people throughout the last century. The first residents of Sunset Park (which was then considered part of Bay Ridge) were Irish and Scandinavian, working-class people who got jobs on the Brooklyn waterfront. Most of the apartments above the bar were filled with people straight from Ireland, and in the summertime, students working in New York were able to rent apartments temporarily. The building still houses a number of Irish people, though numbers have declined recently.
The original owner of the bar was Frank Lawler, who was born in County Kildare, Ireland and emigrated to the U.S in the 1950s. Lawler purchased the building from the city in 1964, saving it from auction after the landlord at the time failed to pay his taxes. Lawler died in 2005, but he remains a legendary figure to the people who go to the Irish Haven, reminiscent of a time when local leaders took it upon themselves to provide assistance to fellow countrymen who needed help adjusting to life in Brooklyn.
“He was known for helping out anybody who needed a hand,” Collins said. He added that Lawler paid for funerals for his customers who had no family in New York. He loaned people money and helped people find jobs or apartments.
John Michael Paulson, 41, is a longtime patron and union carpenter who grew up in Sunset Park and has occasionally worked as a bouncer and D.J. for the Irish Haven. Paulson mentioned how Lawler paid for the funerals of “old drunks, maybe ex-Vietnam.”
“No one knew shit about it,” Paulson said. “It wasn’t announced.”
When Lawler died, his son ran the bar for a couple years until the Lawler family put the bar up for sale. It was then purchased by Matt Hogan and Maureen Collins — Mike Collin’s wife.
“Matt, my wife and I were all customers in the bar prior to purchasing it,” said Collins.
Maureen Collin’s christening was held in the Irish Haven. Her family had been going there since before she was born — even before her mother and father were married — and were longtime friends of the Lawlers.
“There aren’t too many that are authentic in that we have been in the neighborhood for a long time and pretty much under the same type of ownership,” Collins said of Sunset Park bars. “Frank Lawler was a gentleman who came from Ireland and raised a family here. My family, my wife’s family came from Ireland and raised a family in this neighborhood. We try to run the bar as Frank Lawler did, as an honest and welcoming place.”
Yet there are some who patronize the bar that say it’s not as welcoming as Collins claims. But they still come anyway.
“It’s known to be a rowdy place,” Brooklyn native Christine Goh said. “It has a reputation for not being safe.”
Goh, 36, grew up in Bensonhurst, moved away to Miami for a couple years, and returned to Sunset Park. She’s an elder abuse social worker and a single mother. She’s been coming to the Irish Haven for the past couple years, sometimes two or three times a month, sometimes not at all. It’s nearby, she says, and better than the Soccer Tavern a few blocks away. At the Haven, she can “forget everything for a couple of hours,” despite the rough reputation and unsolicited offers to partake in orgies.
I heard other stories about wild times at the Irish Haven. How two men got kicked out, only to come back a few minutes later and bombard the bar with glass bottles of Snapple from the nearby bodega, breaking a window. I was there late one night when one man punched another in the back room and was promptly thrown out by the bouncer. I watched John Michael Paulson sit at the bar and throw coasters around until he was warned to calm down.
“You can’t tell a book by its cover,” Collins said. “Some of our clientele are working people and sometimes look a little rough. When strangers get to meet them, they’ll find everyone in that bar is friendly and welcoming — to friends and strangers alike.”
Still, Goh’s other observation is that the clientele of the bar is predominantly white.
“Every once in a while, you see a minority peeking in,” she said. “They see me and they’re more comfortable with me.”
Sunset Park has been changing for decades. In the 1960s, Puerto Ricans began to arrive. In the 2000s, the neighborhood has seen a growth in its Chinese population. In 2015, the neighborhood was 44 percent Hispanic (mostly Mexican and Puerto Rican), 28 percent Asian, and 24 percent white. Collins says that there aren’t as many Irish people coming to the U.S. anymore.
To Sinjin Rodriguez, who is Puerto Rican, the Irish Haven is a reflection of the “melting pot” which is Sunset Park. Rodriguez, 26, grew up and continues to live in the neighborhood and is involved in local politics. He comes to the Irish Haven two or three times a month, for “nostalgia and convenience.”
“It reminds me of when I was growing up in Sunset,” Rodriguez said. “A lot of shop fronts and locations have changed. Irish has always been the same.”
Rodriguez is part of a group of friends that patronize the Haven regularly — they grew up together in the neighborhood, they went to school around the corner. When I ran into them at the bar, they were catching up after a few of them had returned from a trip to Spain, and had gathered around Mike Collins, 28, who works in investment banking and is the son of the owners. He sat on the counter with the ease of ownership, casually facilitating his drunken friends.
Collins lives above the bar and considers himself a regular — he comes in at least once a week. “Everybody knows each other, looks out for each other,” Collins said. “This is the real America.”
Follow Clara McMichael @clarawmcm
