Lucy Gellman Photo
Mansfield.
For Anna Liffey’s owner Patrick Mansfield, the journey to the U.S. didn’t begin in his family’s pub, where eight siblings and extra guests at the dinner table could sometimes feel crowded. Or when a brother and sister moved to New York in the 1980s, opening pubs in Queens and Brooklyn. Or when he traveled 100 miles across Ireland to see Irish rock sensation Rory Gallagher at 14, and realized that the country — and the world — were a lot bigger than his native County Waterford in southeast Ireland.
Nope. It started instead between the worn covers of a book he’s since read many times: On The Road, published by American beat author Jack Kerouac in 1957.
Mansfield picked up the book two decades after it was originally published, and devoured it from cover to cover. Soon, the concept of a road trip across America became an abiding fantasy, and then a mission to which the then-teenager held fiercely. By the late ‘80s, Mansfield had caught the Kerouac bug badly, and couldn’t let it go.
“I was reading American literature … a lot of books, and one book that I really liked was On The Road,” Mansfield said on a recent episode of WNHH radio’s “Open for Business.” “I thought the possibilities in America sounded amazing. Traveling across the country,” especially.
Soccer scarves adorn the ceiling.
He’d already done that in Ireland, hitching rides across the country and pitching a tent where he wanted to sleep after days of travel. He wasn’t unhappy in County Waterford, where his parents and siblings always found work for him to do around their pub and small grocery. But he couldn’t let go of the idea of traveling another country coast to coast.
“I thought: I should go to America,” he said. “Even reading things about … stopping at a diner and getting coffee and apple pie. You listened to music and the guys were like talking about jazz and blues and bebop and … this crazy music, and they’re partying like crazy, traveling around and doing … wanderlust or whatever, maybe?”
He didn’t go right to New York. Instead, he worked in London, trading shifts at a pub for a welding job in Wimbledon. That city, and an ensuing rail trip across Europe, gave him an education of sorts, he said: It was the first place where he interacted with people who didn’t look and talk exactly as he did. And it instilled in him a distinct taste for loud, cosmopolitan city life.
Dollar bills from Anna Liffey’s opening night in 1997.
“My first night in England I was hanging out with four Jamaicans,” he half-laughed in the interview. “We went to a black club, and it was kind of neat … I’m coming from Ireland, and, like, I didn’t see my first black person until I was 8, and it was a missionary.”
Mansfield liked London. There he expanded his musical repertoire from Rory Gallagher and the rock music of the ‘60s and ‘70s to reggae, refining his skills in construction and engineering as he explored a new home.
But the city wasn’t enough for him. So he headed to New York.
Bringing The Pub To New Haven
The bar downstairs.
Once he was in New York, Mansfield couldn’t fathom leaving. As a teen in County Waterford, he’d been awed by artists like Jackson Pollock; now he was in a city where the Museum of Modern Art actively collected them for the public’s viewing benefit. In need of a source of income, he worked a construction job and opened a pub called Mary Willies in the Woodside area of Queens.
“There was no Irish bars” in Woodside, he reasoned. He was right: Mary Willies prospered because it filled a void. For a while, he thought he’d never leave New York City.
That changed when one of his regulars, Ashley Sheridan — yes, the same Ashley Sheridan with whom The Trinity’s Shane Carty and Eddie Higgins worked in New Haven — mentioned that he was thinking of opening an Irish Bar in New Haven, where he was living. He was looking for a business partner. At first, Mansfield hesitated, only offering to give advice. It seemed, he said, way too far from the bar he had just built in Queens.
But then he visited New Haven. “I was initially going to come up to New Haven to give him [Sheridan] some advice,” Mansfield said. “So I came up, and it was a beautiful fall day, and we’re driving down the Merritt Parkway on the way back into New York City, and I’m thinking, ‘Man, here I am going back into New York City when Connecticut’s so nice.”
That thought, winding through his mind like Kerouac’s words, wouldn’t leave him alone. He was sold. He could move to New Haven, Mary Willies would stay open, and he would drive the “hour, hour and a bit” between the two bars several times a week.
Bartender Ray Coyle.
That was 1996. When they opened up in 1997, they got a response from the community that they’d been hoping for: beers couldn’t be poured, stew ladled, and soccer discussed fast or furiously enough.
“New Haven was really … kind of a cultural wasteland. When we opened, suddenly we were really busy. We had a run of five years of tremendous business. We were naive. We didn’t realize how busy it was going to be. We had a guy [Shane Carty, now co-owner of the Trinity] cook for us. We were trying to replicate Irish cuisine.”
That was 19 years ago. Since then Mansfield has thought a lot about how he wants to preserve that feeling — as if he has brought some of Ireland’s brehon laws to New Haven — as pub culture grows in the city and the craft beer industry explodes nationwide.
“It’s interesting,” he said, noting that Anna Liffey’s is at the center of it as a big supporter of Two Roads beer. “It’s shaken it up a small bit. Now in American bars, there are a lot of craft bars and they’re doing well. You can go to the breweries now and buy beer at the brewery. You have to up your game.”
“I like it,” he added of New Haven specifically. “It’s a good town. It’s really changed a lot for the better … 20 years ago it was a completely different landscape. It’s a really nice place to live. You can do anything you want in New Haven.”
To listen to the entire interview, click on or download the audio above. “Open for Business is supported by Frontier. Frontier is proud to be Connecticut’s hometown provider of TV, Internet and Phone for your home and business. Their number is 1.888.Frontier and their website is frontier.com.
