Ryan’s Daughter Is Home for Many On The Upper East Side

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The big neon sign hanging in the very back of the deep, open barroom is obscenely large for its intended purpose. It glows red to show a cartoonish outline of a short heeled, clown-toed boot. The word “REPAIR” leaps from inside the boot in bright green letters.

The boot is visible from outdoors when the bar is open, which it had been almost every day for the last 40 years until last March, when the pandemic shut everything down.

Inside, the boot is only upstaged by the warm but dimly lit rectangular sign that says Ryan’s Daughter. This ivory and red stained glass piece hangs proudly from the middle of the rafter separating the front of the bar from the back.

The shoe repair sign has not been at 350 East 85th St. for very long, especially considering that the building has been around since at least 1916. But longevity is not what makes the boot a touchstone for the bar. Rather, its importance lies in how the sign arrived at Ryan’s Daughter, an Upper East Side watering hole that shelters a cozy crew of regulars.

The way the sign arrived is how most people and things have arrived at the bar — mildly adrift, seeking another place to call home.

For most of its existence, the red and green boot hung across the street in the shop window of a beloved Italian shoemaker who didn’t speak much English and who spent most of his life working in the same window. When he abandoned his post for a while, neighbors worried he had died without a proper send-off. Turns out he was sick but was planning to retire.

In a good-natured scheme to give the man a proper farewell and potentially acquire the sign, Ryan’s Daughter threw him a retirement party.

The whole neighborhood was there, says Ryan’s Daughter bartender-turned-manager-turned-owner Jimmy Gerding, and the glowing boot became the next fixture in their lives, a reminder of neighbors past.

Pinned up in the bar basement, close to where the diminished number of kegs are stored, is a picture of the bald shoemaker, a smile creasing his already wrinkled face as if happily surprised by the camera’s click.

This scrapbook office contains more old photos, one of Jimmy’s son Henry as a toddler standing atop the bar, another of bartender Walter DeForest in a van Gogh costume. A water-stained album cover for the soundtrack to the 1970 David Lean romance epic, “Ryan’s Daughter,” has a photo of Stoney McGurrin fastened onto the lower right corner.

The picture of bespectacled and mischief-eyed Stoney, who owns the building and founded Ryan’s Daughter, is nothing special, just his compact Irish frame balancing on a ladder in front of the bar, a clear blue day behind him.

No one knows exactly why Stoney chose to name the bar Ryan’s Daughter. Anyone who asks can’t get a straight answer, just that he wanted to name it after a woman. At nearly 80 years old, Stoney remains a strong part of the bar’s family, refusing to accept Jimmy’s rent during the challenging times of the pandemic, not to mention voluntarily re-glossing the bar’s hardwood floors during its closure.

Even after Jimmy hired someone else to build the bar’s new outdoor dining setup—one spacious central stall, flanked by two others, all with dark-stained wooden tables and high-backed benches—Stoney can still be found making his own finishing touches.

Ryan’s Daughter sits in the heart of Yorkville, not quite on the corner of East 85th and First Avenue but visible from First. The building itself is a pre-war, red-brick three-story walkup with a jade green crosshead. At first glance, the exterior of Ryan’s Daughter is a prelude to what is inside: modest and charming eccentricity.

Jutting out over the second-floor fire escape, which holds a single fake palm tree, are two large flags billowing side-by-side, one American and one Irish. A green Heineken sign mounted to the front of the building and a Guinness sign on the left indicate that alcohol is sold at the establishment, in case anyone needs reminding. Hanging over the fire escape is a short red awning that reads “Private Party Room” in white, gothic lettering. A larger awning in the same style reads “Ryan’s Daughter” and hangs out over the bar’s large front windows.

The small spot beneath the awning is gated and turfed, and until recently the two modest tables it held were the only semblance of outdoor seating the bar offered.

During warmer months, the garden gate holds long, half-filled flower boxes and on the corner hangs an open tin of dog food in case any passing canines need a snack.

In the corner of the front window dangles a small hand-painted sign advertising Walter’s art performance called “Van Gogh Find Yourself.” His work can be found on the second floor hanging around the fireplace, inviting you to sit and enjoy. Sometimes, Walter is there, too.

Ryan’s Daughter is the kind of place where keys can be dropped off at the bar for a friend to grab, or packages held for patrons. It’s a place where discourse and disagreements are allowed, though even on its rowdiest nights fights rarely break out. It’s a place where Gerry the bartender can comfortably step away for a few minutes in the afternoon to smoke a cigarette and leave customers on their own. It’s a place where couples have met, many still together today.

“It created a neighborhood for me for the first time in my life,” says bartender Hema Nair. “Even from England to various places in New York, I never really had that. Ryan's Daughter was the sun and everything else orbited around it—it just provided an actual neighborhood.”

Rock star Nikolai Fraiture of The Strokes was a regular for a while, late ESPN anchor Stuart Scott also popped into the bar every now and then, as did the late Andy Rooney. Bobby Valentine, the former Mets manager, came in for a drink the day after his team lost to the Yankees in Game 5 of the 2000 World Series.

But most folks just come from the Yorkville neighborhood that is traditionally defined by German and Irish working-class families.

For a few years before McGurrin bought the building in 1980, the bar was called the Minstrel Boy. Before that, it had a long run as a joint called Old Stream, owned by John and Stella Billovits. Before Old Stream, it was owned by Germans — who had Nazi ties in the 1940s, McGurrin says. Before that, it had been a Synagogue.

A framed periwinkle bowling shirt with the words “Old Stream Bar & Rest” hangs on one of the bar’s walls. There’s also a bus stop sign from Dublin, gifted to Stoney by The Wolfe Tones, a famous Irish band, and a pair of denim-covered wooden legs with cowboy boots that poke through the ceiling behind the center of the long bar.

The shirt belongs to Rosie Yurasits, a Yorkville fixture and former bartender who used to wheel her daughter’s stroller into Old Stream with all of the other mothers who had spent their days in Carl Schurz Park and needed a drink to relax.

Carol Blakesley, Rosie’s daughter, spent most of her childhood around the bar and remembers her father also bartending at the Old Stream. Carol had her first legal drink there, spent countless holidays, birthdays and parties there. She met her husband through friends from the bar and her surprise bridal shower was held in the upstairs party room.

“My mother always says, ‘I’m in the walls of that place,’ and I like to say, ‘If you’re in the walls, I’m in the woodwork,’” says Carol.

The bar is a common thread for many people who have grown up in Yorkville, passed through, or who have only visited once or twice. It is not quite a tourist trap nor cobwebby museum, the way a place like McSorley’s became, but it maintains a similar nostalgic aura.

True to form, the bar has ebbed and flowed with the city’s indoor capacity rules. After closing last March, Ryan’s Daughter stayed closed until early October. When indoor dining shut down again in December, the bar followed suit.

Somewhat surprised in the aftermath of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's decision to reopen indoor dining on Valentine’s Day, Jimmy felt it was finally the right time to pursue an outdoor dining setup in the street, like so many others had before him.

The ultimate goal was to create something that would carry the bar through the warmer months, not that the place needs much help. Having reopened on Friday, Feb. 26, Jimmy said it was as busy as it could get.

Everything is by reservation only (text 929-279-2673), and shepherd’s pie is the anchor item on their formally-less-formal food menu. It’s a recipe Stoney has passed down to Fernando, the bar’s caretaker-of-all-trades for the last 30 years.

The outdoor setup is also wheelchair accessible, so that everyone — including longtime regular Dennis, who typically sits at his own custom desk in the middle of the barroom — can enjoy the outdoor setup.

“It is what the neighborhood makes of it … and the reason is because the locals care about it,” says part-time bartender Sebastian Barrera, who grew up across the street in the apartment above the old shoemaker.

Amid an onslaught of change, Ryan’s Daughter endures as it always has, with its remarkable ability to nourish whoever steps inside — first with friendship, then with a drink.

Anna Grazulis is a freelance writer and producer covering New York sports and beyond. Currently a part-time student in the master's program at Columbia Journalism School, she can be reached at anna.grazulis@columbia.edu or via Twitter @annagraz.