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Bar Nears Last Call As Development Looms

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By LIZ BLEAU, The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 20, 2008

RIVERVIEW - When the wrecking crews come this year to tear down local landmark Dan's Bar, owner Dan Pickard, 67, won't be on hand.

"I wouldn't be able to bear it," he said.
Pickard grew up in the house next to the bar his late father bought in 1946 and which he took over operating 30 years ago when his father died.

The bar, an adjacent mobile home park with about 20 trailers and Keith's Marine, on the other side of the bar, have been sold to a development group that plans to build an assisted-living facility with 350 units, stores, restaurants and medical offices.

The project includes several waterside restaurants and a riverfront walkway along the Alafia that will be open to the public, according to developer Rich Mozdzer, whose partner is Frank Sirchia, a local physician.

Pickard, who owns the bar property at 8607 U.S. 301 S. and the neighboring mobile home park, said the bar building dates to 1936 and was a Depression-era roadhouse and general store that evolved into a bar.
Pickard didn't plan on being in the bar business. He earned a bachelor's degree in business from the University of Tampa and then went into the Marines. After leaving the Marines, he took a white-collar job at an insurance company.

"I wasn't suited to that lifestyle, of being cooped up all day in an office," he said.

So he went back to school as an apprentice electrician, and four years later was a journeyman electrician working in industrial construction. He began buying real estate with the money he earned.

"I had no intention of running this place," he said as he stood outside the bar, "but it just sort of fell to me."

His father, also named Dan, "sort of fell into the bar," he said. "He was in real estate, too, and he stumbled across the property and was able to buy it dirt cheap. And then he did the same thing I did, which was to use the money generated by the bar to buy properties."

From his dad, he learned to fish in the nearby Alafia River.

"We would spend our time outdoors, and did a lot of fishing and hunting. The river was full of alligators, and we hunted hogs," he said.

He recalls the Riverview area around the bar was undeveloped except for orange groves and a few gas stations and country stores.

"We never went anywhere, except to Tampa once a week for supplies," he said. "And that was usually East Tampa, at Six Mile Creek or to Ybor City."

Along the river, in front of the mobile home park he owns, he points to a palm tree.

"That's one of five planted here by the old Peru Mining Co., the early name for Riverview. The area there was the site of the mining offices and headquarters," he said.
Pickard has seen the area grow and develop. For him, the biggest change has been the behavior of people and children.

"Back then, no one got into trouble or into drugs," he said. "You went to school, graduated, got a job and then a home. You did what was expected of you."
Pickard thinks Dan's Bar is one of the oldest, continuously operating bars in the state. It hasn't been closed a day, even last year when a nearby ammonia leak caused an evacuation of the area.

"We just kicked back and rode it out," Pickard said, proud that this "old Cracker beer joint" on U.S. 301 has never been closed a full day.

The bar, which sells only beer or wine, holds about 50 people, has a loyal base of customers and usually fills up on the weekends.

One of those regular customers is Bob Stevens, 63, who lives in the mobile home park behind the bar.

"I've been coming here since 1980," he said. "Sometimes I work here and tend bar."

"This is a safe place," he said. "We're not a bunch of drunks; everyone here has a darned good heart."

He said that when some residents in the Big Bend area were hit by a storm in 1992, the bar patrons raised money through a car wash to help them. They brought the storm victims to the bar for food and offered them shelter in their homes.

When the bar does close, at a date that has not been set, Pickard is planning a final farewell bash with food and T-shirts commemorating Dan's Bar.

"There's a lot of memories here," he said. "The landscape is changing so fast. All this will be wiped away and no one will know all this was ever here."

Reporter Liz Bleau can be reached at (813) 865-1557 or lbleau@tampatrib.com.

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