Ryan's Daughter

The day after the Mets lost Game 5 of the 2000 World Series to the Yankees, their manager, Bobby Valentine, came into Ryan's Daughter for a drink¹. We called it a friendly Irish pub just far enough from Second Avenue to keep a neighborhood vibe, and in 2021 it was still the kind of place where keys could be dropped off at the bar for a friend to grab, or packages held for patrons¹.

The building has stood since at least 1916, and by one account it was once a synagogue¹. There has been a bar in the space since Prohibition, when it was a German club². Later came a long run as the Old Stream, owned by John and Stella Billovits and licensed under that name until the 1970s, and in 1974 it was renamed the Minstrel Boy^{1, 3}.

Stoney McGurrin bought it in 1979, or the building in 1980, depending on whom you ask, and named it after David Lean's 1970 film set in Ireland, starring Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles^{1, 2, 3}. Why that film, nobody knows exactly¹. A bus stop sign from Dublin, a gift to him from the Irish band the Wolfe Tones, hangs in the bar, and the bar's red and green boot spent most of its life across the street, in the shop window of a beloved Italian shoemaker¹.

Nikolai Fraiture of the Strokes was a regular for a while, and ESPN's Stuart Scott and Andy Rooney stopped in now and then¹.

By 2016 the bar belonged to Jim Gerding and a partner who met him while working there in the late nineties; they had officially taken over in 2011, and McGurrin, nearly 80 in 2021, was still part of the bar's family^{1, 3}. Upstairs there's weekly trivia, and for the 2026 World Cup the bar showed every match, opening both floors with the sound turned up for the USA games and the final^{2, 4, 5, 6}.