Syracuse, N.Y. — Peter Coleman was more than just a publican on Syracuse’s West Side.
He was a teller of tales, a keeper of traditions and the leading citizen of one of Syracuse’s most iconic neighborhoods.
The owner of Coleman’s Authentic Irish Pub on Tipperary Hill died Wednesday evening. He was 84.
He had been ill for a short time, a family friend said.
Coleman was 18 when he took over the small corner tavern at 100 S. Lowell Ave. that his father, Peter A. Coleman, had opened in 1933.
Over the years, the younger Coleman tripled the bar’s size, sealed the dirt floor and built it into the kind of place that almost everyone in town had heard of and most had likely ventured into. Using the pub as a base, Coleman also became a passionate supporter of the Tipp Hill neighborhood, buying and restoring houses in the area and instigating the dedication of a statue to its Irish heritage: The Stone Throwers.
“All I did,” Coleman said on a Sunday afternoon back in March, “was bring people together. That’s what we needed. Friends would come here. They’d bring their children, and over the years, they’d bring their children. That’s what it’s all about. Bringing people together.”
In whatever he did, Coleman was a larger-than-life character, apt to tell a tall tale or two and even embellish that the next time around.
Take the story of the annual Green Beer parade at Coleman’s, which kicks off what he liked to call “St. Patrick’s Day Season” in Syracuse.
Did he invent green beer? Coleman said he never heard of anyone serving green beer before he did, and “that’s good enough for me.” Green Beer Day, he believes, put his pub on the map. “Ireland itself is mesmerized by our merchandising,” he said.
In 1978, as he once told former Post-Standard columnist Sean Kirst, he made one of the biggest decisions of his life: He gave up alcohol and became a non-drinking bar owner. He had, he said, spent too much time “whacked out.”
The Coleman family business extends beyond his own pub. His brother, Danny, founded The Dubliner Pub in Washington, D.C., and his family has or has had other businesses in Central New York, including the Cashel House gift shop his sister once owned across from Coleman’s and the Lake House Pub in Skaneateles, owned by his son, Dennis.
His legacy is most apparent in his longtime home of Tipp Hill. (He grew up on Bryant Avenue.)
In a 2013 Kirst column, Jerry “Bones” Roesch, then owner of the nearby George O’Dea’s tavern, described Coleman “as the best self-promoter Tipp Hill has ever had. He took a place that had plywood floors and sawdust and turned it into a palace, and what he does trickles down to the rest of us. Who knows what Tipp Hill might be without him?”
Funeral arrangements are incomplete.
READ MORE: Peter Coleman on leadership: How to build a business and maintain a neighborhood
Don Cazentre writes for NYup.com, syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. Reach him at dcazentre@nyup.com, or follow him at NYup.com, on Twitter or Facebook. Charlie Miller, a journalist at syracuse.com, can be reached at cmiller@syracuse.com or (315)382-1984.