Tampa's Four Green Fields lives on, inside a warehouse
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The exterior of the new home of Four Green Fields. Photo: Ben Montgomery/Axios
Okay, y'all, someone has completely recreated the original Four Green Fields inside of a warehouse in the shadow of downtown Tampa.
- If you've read this news elsewhere, good for you. We had not heard and we now want to shout it.
- Ben stopped in on Tuesday and smiled for about an hour … just sat on the bar stool and smiled.
Catch up fast: If you're new here, Four Green Fields was an edgy and political Irish pub in a thatch-roofed building on Platt Street that opened in 1992. In a city of good bars, Four Green Fields was among the best.
- A frequent haunt of the grizzled Tampa Tribune reporters, the pub hosted some of Ireland's most famous entertainers, including Sinead O'Connor and Paddy Reilly.
- It closed its flagship Downtown Tampa location in 2020, victim of the pandemic, though you could still grab a pint at a Tampa International Airport outpost and on the edge of Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park.
What's happening: A mural depicting the front of the old location welcomes you from the parking lot, then the familiar green door from the Platt Street building swings open to reveal an interior that is almost an exact replica of the original.
- It's uncanny. Same bar, same old Irish newspaper clippings on the walls.
- Squint and you're standing in the original, but it's inside an old 16,000 square-foot warehouse at 802 N 12th St., in that overlooked industrial patch between Ybor City and Channelside.
Four Green Fields owner Colin Breen hired Chris Jones, a bartender who had a small construction company, to lovingly recreate the old pub, which Jones had never seen before.
- He worked from photos, he told us, and was careful with every detail.
What's next: It's not on the calendar, but the barkeep tells us that the pub will welcome the Irish music legends The Wolf Tones for a soft opening on Friday evening. You heard that here first.
