Another chapter to a real life fairytale of New York

It was a stop on the tourist itinerary of anyone from the East Mayo area who made it to New York. And now Rosie O’Grady’s, one of Manhattan’s most famous bars, is set for a new lease of life when it reopens in the coming months.

Mike Carty will reopen Rosie O’Grady’s later this spring, having found a new home for the bar, which he opened in the early 1970s with Austin Delaney from Brickens.

The original venue, on 7th Avenue between Central Park and Times Square, had to close during the Covid-19 pandemic when diners were forced to stay home. Such was the establishment’s standing that the local press mourned its passing while the British tabloid, The Daily Mail, ran a story on legendary singer-songwriter Neil Diamond mourning the loss of his local.

The new Rosie O’Grady’s will be located at the Michelangelo Hotel on the corner of 51st Street and 7th Avenue in the Midtown District. It’s a short walk to the Rockefeller Center, 5th Avenue and the bright lights of Times Square and Broadway.

“We will be ready in a couple of weeks," Carty explained. “We were three or four months working on it but we have the liquor license now... it’s coming along great.” 

 The new location for Rosie O’Grady was formerly occupied by Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. 

“They closed back in May. We were lucky to find it and sign a long-term lease,” said Carty.

The longevity of the original Rosie O’Grady’s – it lasted over four decades – speaks to the management nous of Carty and Delaney in an industry with a high failure rate in arguably the most competitive, high-rent bar market in the world. Some 90% of Manhattan bars close within five years of opening, crushed by competition and high rents, according to data compiled by the trade. Those that succeed reward their owners handsomely.

The new venue brings Rosie O’Grady’s back to “within a block from where we were for 43 years,” said Carty. 

“Now we are back to where Austin and myself started out in 1976," the Leitrim native adds.

He’s expecting to see a lot of the old customers return. Rosie O’Grady’s typically drew a clientele of theatre-goers, tourists and stock brokers who came for long steak lunches or pre-theatre dinner or post-show drinks. Carty expects a similar clientele to return. 

“Brokerage houses are located nearby,” he observes. 

Being located in the 220-room Michelangelo will also bring its own additional clientele, he expects.

Carty has brought two friends in to take a 50% stake in the new incarnation of Rosie O’Grady’s, which in layout is similar to the old: a steakhouse, function room and a couple of bars for the night trade.

But as he gets ready for reopening, Carty knows the New York City trade has also changed, with many white-collar workers spending more time in their home offices.

“The night and weekend trade has recovered well since Covid but the lunch trade has changed. It hasn’t come back in the same way.” 

Even though he’s a Leitrim man by birth, Mike Carty has close ties to the parish of Bekan in East Mayo that go beyond Brickens, home of his long-time business partner Austin Delaney. Carty’s email address is inspired by Bekan cross – a crossroads near the church and near his wife Caroline’s home place, the Duggan homestead.

Carty has another connection to the Ballyhaunis area: growing up in Aughavas in Leitrim his primary school teacher was the legendary Seamus Duffy from Aghamore.

“He was a great character, he drained the football field and had us all playing football and he started us in music. We all learned the tin whistle," he recalls. 

Carty returned to New York in the 1960s when his family moved back – his parents having moved back to Leitrim for a period. But his accent is more Aughavas than Manhattan.

Before our conversation ends, the talk turns to football and politics. Carty, a key figure in the New York GAA community, is looking forward to greeting supporters of the Mayo team, which plays the Connacht championship in the Bronx just after Easter. Another big event in 2024 is the presidential election. In decades past, campaigns were often plotted in saloons where Irish American cadres of the Democratic Party machine gathered to plot.

But Carty thinks the political scene has changed a lot, not least the allegiances of the Irish Americans. 

“I can’t get over the number of Irish people, even first-generation immigrants, who are for Trump,” he says.

Carty praises Biden’s achievements in office and sees Trump as a “dangerous man”. The new Rosie O’Grady’s will no doubt bring out all shades of opinion and allegiances in New York when it reopens. It’ll also be a time to celebrate the impact and good work of a Mayo man who opened the original Rosie’s with Carty

When he died in 2009 at the age of 70, Austin Delaney was eulogised in The New York Times as a pillar of the Irish community, a quiet, generous man who made a fortune after arriving in New York with “five shillings and a union card” in his pocket.

His many trips to the Galway Races, bringing cousins and childhood friends from Brickens and Tulrahan along, were remembered during his wake at Keane’s pub in Cloonfad in 2009. Carty’s description of him in The New York Times was telling: “Austin was a low-key individual who did an awful lot for people to them to give them a start and didn’t want any recognition, he was a quiet person who did things the quiet way.”