DAYTONA BEACH — In 1986, Randall Phillips was a skinny little 10-year-old washing glasses and helping with kid-sized tasks in the Tir na nOg Irish Pub on East International Speedway Boulevard.
His father had just started managing the pub, and Phillips was beginning to sculpt a dream of making it a mini Hard Rock House of Blues with a small outdoor beer garden.
Now, nearly 40 years later, Phillips owns the pub, the dilapidated bar building has been condemned, and city government staff is saying it’s time for the two-story structure near the ocean to be torn down.
City commissioners were slated to vote at their Wednesday, Dec. 17, meeting on paying a company to demolish the pub, but on Dec. 16 Phillips had an attorney file an injunction aimed at stopping the demolition.
The city manager announced at the beginning of the Dec. 17 meeting that the bar demolition measure had been pulled off the agenda, but he made no mention of the legal matter or when the demolition proposal might reappear on an agenda.
Phillips has been in a legal battle with the city over his buildings for years. The feud mushroomed in recent weeks when Phillips said some of his bar windows were shattered during an asbestos abatement test, and the city limited the amount of time he could be in his bar to remove his property.
“They’ve ruined my livelihood and made me look like a damn fool,” he said in an interview earlier this week. “I spent every penny I had to pay off that place.”
Phillips has resigned himself to the strong possibility that the bar building, and two more buildings next to it that he owns, will all be torn down.
If that has to happen, he wants to handle the demolition himself. The demolition company the city chose would charge about $55,000 to level the Tir na nOg and remove asbestos from Phillips’ cluster of three buildings. But Phillips contends there’s much less asbestos than the city has concluded, and he has talked to someone who could do the job for about $27,500.
Daytona trying to clear out dilapidation, revitalize corridor
If Phillips’ buildings are toppled, they’ll be just the latest structures to disappear from the East International Speedway Boulevard landscape. At least three other buildings on the one-mile-long corridor have been leveled recently, and an old Subway sandwich shop building next to the Tir na nOg has also been condemned.
The city has been condemning or acquiring buildings along the eight-block stretch of East International Speedway Boulevard for the past few decades in its quest to tear them down and revitalize the corridor.
The East International Speedway Boulevard of a few generations ago was a place with grocery stores, a drive-in with waitresses on roller skates, an ice cream shop, fine dining restaurants, and doctors’ offices.
But in recent decades, the road between the Halifax River and Atlantic Ocean has been dominated by bars, strip clubs, convenience stores, vacant lots and beat-up empty buildings.
It’s the city’s main gateway to the beach, and local leaders have long been embarrassed by it and frustrated that they haven’t been able to redevelop it sooner.
They’ve been reinvigorated this year by a $30 million overhaul of East International Speedway Boulevard that has brought a fresh blanket of black asphalt, unblemished sidewalks, a new landscaped median and lots of freshly planted palm trees.
Phillips still hopes to be part of that revitalization, and he has an investor interested in helping him out.
He’s heard developers want his land, which is located on the southwest corner of the intersection with Grandview Avenue. But he still wants to chase his dreams for the property.
The Tir na nOg backstory
The building the Tir na nOg pub is located in was constructed in 1920 and subdivided into four apartments. In 1972, it became a liquor store and bar.
Phillips’ father ran the bar from 1986 to 1992, and in 2002 the father and son started renting the bar building, a tiny building just behind it used for apartments, and a third building next door that was once Howard’s ice cream parlor.
In 2010, they bought the properties and lost the grandfather clause for the old ice cream parlor, a small one-story building that had also been a pizza place called Shroomers and a gas station.
At some point, they found out that there was a gasoline plume beneath the little one-story building that extended across the street. The underground contamination has been under review and remediation led by the Environmental Protection Agency since at least 2006.
Phillips said the fuel plume, most likely from the old gas station, has tied his hands on moving forward with plans to revamp the little building.
The building has sat empty, and it has deteriorated so badly that the city condemned it in February. It’s still standing, but the windows are boarded up, and it’s in need of a major overhaul.
Phillips’ bar building was condemned in September. He and his dad invested $100,000 in the pub when they first bought it, and they’ve spent many thousands more in the 15 years since on maintenance, repairs and equipment.
He had an investor 12 years ago, but the investor was sidelined first by a heart attack, and then a stroke. Then Phillips’ father became very ill for three months, followed by a health problem Phillips developed.
Phillips said he’s been hit with a steady stream of code violations for 15 years, some of which he maintains he didn’t know he had until January when he applied for city permits to make repairs and was denied because there was a lien lock on his property.
You can reach Eileen at Eileen.Zaffiro@news-jrnl.com
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Daytona beachside Irish pub owner fighting city demolition
Reporting by Eileen Zaffiro-Kean, Daytona Beach News-Journal / The Daytona Beach News-Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
