The Wall Street Journal-20080122-Enterprise- It-s Last Call for Guinan-s Pub and Store- Shifting Tastes- Goals of Family Lead to Closure
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Enterprise: It's Last Call for Guinan's Pub and Store; Shifting Tastes, Goals of Family Lead to Closure
Garrison, N.Y. -- In the fall of 2001, just weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, I wandered into a tiny pub and country store here along the Hudson River. The bartender was a cheery, elderly Irishman named Jim Guinan. He pointed us to cracked green barstools, yanked cold beers from an old metal Coca-Cola cooler, and spun tales until the sun started to set.
I didn't know this joint's full story then -- or the sacrifices made by this man's family to keep it alive. What I did know was that sitting there felt like home, and with my own Manhattan apartment temporarily shut from the attacks, a home was what I needed.
Eleven days later, I moved to Garrison, threw myself into this pub's eclectic world and even wrote a book about it.
Guinan's, as it's called, has been beating the odds for a while. But after nearly 50 years in business, those odds have finally caught up, and on Jan. 31 the pub and store will close its doors. After three generations of Guinans helping to run the place, the absence of a full-time family member to chart the store's course leaves no other choice.
Statistically, its survival so far is a wonder. Only about 12% of family-owned businesses make it to the third generation. A mere 3% reach the fourth. But stats are a weak salve when the end is near, the beer running low and a town steeling for what feels like unspeakable loss.
Guinan's battle is one waged by many small enterprises that struggle against shifting consumer tastes and deeper-pocketed rivals. But more than anything it's a vivid illustration of a more brutal truth: that children don't always follow in their parents' footsteps, or at least not forever.
"You make a better life for them than you had," Jim, now 82, says of what he wanted for his kids. "That's the whole idea of bringing up a family."
Still, it's hard to let go of your parents' namesake, especially when the business involves your family home. Jim has lived upstairs since 1959, and not much has changed since he came to America with his wife, Peg, and four children and opened up shop in this rented house. There are no computers or calculators; just a 1927 wooden cash register. Coins are laid upon the store's counter each morning -- an honor system that lets harried commuters make their own change. In back, a tiny green-walled pub serves only beer.
Market forces have pressured profits. The store's traffic drivers, newspapers and a cup of plain coffee, don't hold the same lure in our latte-addicted, news-on-the-BlackBerry era. Meantime, consumer tastes have shifted toward healthier fare than the buttered rolls and sugary doughnuts sold each morning.
What's never waned, however, is an appetite for the intimacy Guinan's offers -- no flat-screen TVs blaring sports stats, no faceless wireless Internet connections. Morning commuters wave to Jim at his kitchen table; pub drinkers help carry firewood in from the family's pile. When Jim says, "Make yourself at home," as he often does, he means his home.
It's a hard life running a store, up at 4 a.m., on your feet all day, no benefits. "My mother always said, 'Find a job that will take care of you when you retire,'" says Margaret Guinan, the eldest daughter who is a local police detective. "And I did." But when events threatened the store -- her mother's death in 1988, Jim's illness from diabetes soon after -- neither she nor her siblings could bring themselves to walk away.
The youngest, Christine, held the reins for several years; later Margaret and her brother John kept the lights on while working other jobs. "If Dad had kept up, he'd have ended up in the grave," John says. Sometimes they fought over control; often they wanted to quit from exhaustion. Yet they couldn't say goodbye quite yet. And so Guinan's continued against the odds.
Then in the fall of 2006, John suffered a grand mal seizure. Doctors diagnosed him with an aggressive form of brain cancer. While he's doing well, his priorities must lie elsewhere. Christine now lives in Florida. Margaret will soon retire from the police force, but she's ready to start a new chapter.
"It's very, very hard to leave," says Margaret, her voice breaking. "But it's time for me to be selfish now."
Meantime, most of Jim's grandchildren live elsewhere or have other careers; when John's daughter Kelly, a full-time graphic designer who works at Guinan's some nights and Sundays, mulled taking over, her father strongly discouraged her. "She deserves the opportunity to pursue her own dreams," he says. "I wanted to protect her."
And so the legacy will end.
There will be a lot of lasts in these final days.
This Thursday: the last "Rising of the Moon," when musicians across the region descend on Guinan's to play Irish tunes through the night. The next day: the "final Friday" when pub regulars -- from stockbrokers to masons -- gather to parse through the week's events. The following Thursday morning will be the last commuters make change from the counter. The following day, the store will close.
Renovations begin this spring. Jim will probably move to Florida with Christine and soon the building's owners will assess new tenants. Everyone hopes for a Guinan-like replacement, though deep down, everyone also knows the soul of this family business disappears with the family.
With the end near, I take comfort in the words of a young cadet at the nearby West Point military academy. He faces war after graduation this May and has been a familiar face at the pub recently. Guinan's, he wrote me, reminds him "that there is still something pure, and good, and alright in this world."
And with that, Slan leat, Guinan's. Goodbye.
