The Dublin Pub is gone for good, but it didn’t give New Hyde Park an Irish goodbye.
The longtime watering hole was demolished Monday and is set to be replaced by a new retail building about two-and-a-half years after legal trouble caused it to close.
“It brings back a lot of memories, it brings back some good ones,” said Ed Sikorski, a former 27-year New Hyde Park resident, as he watched machines tear into the former bar. “This one is probably the saddest one that I’ve seen in a long time.”
Tseng’s Holdings Inc. will replace the bar with a one-story building with two separate retail spaces totaling 2,938 square feet, according to plans filed with the Town of North Hempstead’s building department.
The Roslyn-based company bought the building for $750,000 at an August 2014 auction, more than a year after the state Liquor Authority revoked the bar’s liquor license.
No businesses have filed applications with the town to fill the new building’s stores.
Efforts to reach Tseng’s Holdings were unavailing.
News of the Dublin Pub’s demolition spread on social media over the weekend, with many members of a New Hyde Park Facebook group lamenting the bar’s end.
Sikorski said the bar was long a hangout for students at St. John’s University, Queens College and Queensborough Community College that attracted patrons from as far as Brooklyn.
In its heyday, it was “a hotspot for teens, ruffians and general loud revelers” who would often spill into the neighboring residential streets, New Hyde Park resident Anita Cummo said.
“It was a mess, and … you never knew what you were going find on Sunday morning when you went out there,” said Cummo, who’s lived around the corner from the property on Hoffman Road since 1977.
The 6,441-square-foot Dublin Pub, which opened as a bar in 1936 and bore that name since 1968, started to falter when the Liquor Authority suspended its liquor license in March 2013.
Owners Stan Majewski and Scott Blitzer had been previously cited for several liquor violations, including two incidents when they allegedly sold alcohol to underage customers who were hospitalized after having too much to drink.
The Liquor Authority revoked their license that April and Majewski and Blitzer voluntarily surrendered it, said Misha Haghani, president of auction firm Paramount Realty USA, in 2013.
The pair bought the Dublin Pub in July 2001 from Tim Moloney, who ran it for many years and played bass in the Boston Burglars, a band that frequented the bar Sikorski said. Nassau County land records show the sale price was $1 million.
The 2013 auction’s original starting price was $899,000, but Haghani said then that no offer hit that mark.
“It was never the same” after Moloney sold it, Sikorski said.
Cummo said she and her neighbors would visit Dublin Pub on St. Patrick’s Day for a meal and an Irish coffee.
The last time she was there was in 2007, when she threw her daughter-in-law’s baby shower at the bar. The food was good and the dance floor “well worn,” she said.
“When something is there that long, you think it’s always going to be there, and it’ll be another little part of New Hyde Park and its history that’s going to disappear off the landscape,” Cummo said.
The $750,000 sale price was less than Majewski and Blitzer owed on the property. Its current assessed value is $730,700, down from $1.4 million in October 2011.
Efforts to reach Richard Gertler, the attorney who represented Majewski and Blitzer in the auction proceedings, were unavailing.
