From the ashes, a new beginning

The owner of O'Hara's pub, just 150 feet from Ground Zero, defies the odds to resurrect his business after Sept. 11.

By BRYAN GILMER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 23, 2002

The last day of my fourth visit, my wife and I visited Ground Zero and found a huge five-story-deep chasm, roughly square.

[Times photo: Bryan Gilmer]

At the World Trade Center recovery site banners advertise the reopening of O’hara’s pub.

We could see little from the sidewalk across Church Street, the southeastern edge of the pit. Dump trucks disappeared down a temporary ramp. Yet the scene suggested construction, not destruction: equipment, temporary office trailers, workers in orange vests and hard hats, several levels of healthy structural steel below grade at two corners of the pit.

We crossed Liberty Street past the corner of the excavation and saw a Burger King still closed and spray-painted "Med trauma" and "NYPD Temp. HQ." Then, a tiny side street parallel to the southwest edge of the chasm. From a metal police barricade at the intersection hung a banner with a giant pint of Guinness and the lettering: "O'HARA'S 120 CEDAR ST. NOW OPEN."

It seemed impossible. Cedar Street, perhaps 150 feet from the edge of the abyss, clearly remained closed. Industrial-size waste bins filled the parallel-parking spaces, and heavy equipment used the travel lanes to reach the recovery site. A police officer said we could cross the barricade to get to the pub -- as long as we had ID.

We picked our way across Church Street and down the sidewalk of shadowy Cedar, passing closed businesses until we smelled new varnish. A shiny wooden storefront gleamed behind another row of police barricades.

The door to O'Hara's opened to a jubilant scene. The 19 people in the bar sounded like 60. They drank pints, laughed and slapped each other on the back at 3 p.m. on a Monday. A thin man in a teal polo shirt was being interviewed by a television crew.

We learned that he was Mike Keane, one of the owners. Just a couple of hours before, the bar had opened for the first time since the terrorist attacks. I ordered a Guinness.

I noticed new molding around the ceiling at the front edge of the place. It matched the stuff behind the bar that looked older. We asked for a menu and were told, "Fresh menu from a brand-new kitchen."

Keane came and shook our hands. He told us how he'd fled the bar after the first tower fell and assumed, when he saw the second tower collapse, that the five-story building he and his partners own had been destroyed with it.

Two weeks later, Keane walked across the moonscape and saw his building standing. The doors and windows were blown in. The bar and the apartments above it were covered with 18 inches of dust and garbage. Keane climbed to the roof afraid he might find the remains of victims. He found a thick layer of paper, computers and files from the towers and a section of his roof ripped away by the force of the implosion.

Keane told us how he began shoveling all of it into big trash bags. The electricity was out, so he used the stairs to carry each one to the curb. A buddy sneaked a van full of plywood in so he could cover some holes. Later, his tenants came and took the few things they wanted. Keane threw everything else away until he uncovered the beautiful old hardwood floors.

Six months later as I sipped my Guinness, the bar looked great. There was even a doughy regular (who strikingly resembles Norm from Cheers) at the corner stool joking that he visits O'Hara's "on occasion. Monday is an occasion; Tuesday is an occasion. ... "

[Times photo: Bryan Gilmer] Mike Keane, one of the owners of O’Hara’s pub, stands behind the bar on the night of its reopening.

It was the day after Easter.

On Easter morning at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, the Rev. Thomas Tewell had preached about the central belief of Christianity: the miracle of the resurrection

Tewell's church is a good church. He had filled his sermon with assurances that everyone sometimes doubts that a man could have been executed and buried, only to rise from his grave as a sign from God that humans' frailty need not doom them.

Others spoke as well. A lawyer stood in the pulpit and told of helping people swear out affidavits that a family member had been killed in the attacks. She had offered to pray with each family.

She told the congregation that a teenage girl had challenged her about Christ's resurrection, asking, "Do you really believe it?"

The lawyer explained that she was silent for several moments, remembering the despair she had seen in those weeks of volunteering, but also recalling the extraordinary kindnesses people had shown one another. Then, she said, she told the girl, "I stake my whole life on it."

Tewell asked the congregation to join him in a centuries-old Christian chant. He shouted, "He is risen!" We shouted back, "He is risen indeed!"

Mike Keane has rebuilt his bar twice.

In 1992, the building burned and smoke flooded the nearby stock exchange. The New York Times picture of ladder trucks hosing water into the windows hangs by the bar.

This time, Keane worked for six months before hearing the cash register ring with the first dollar of revenue. As he reminisced about recovering from the fire, he said - about fixing damage to his building from the worst terror attack on the United States - "This wasn't that bad."

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