Ask anyone who has walked past 201 7th Avenue North in the last two years and you will get the same shrug. The pizza never really stopped. The bar did.
Old Northeast Tavern and its adjoining kitchen, Old Northeast Pizza, have been fixtures on that corner since 2006, and owners Bob Wareham and Mark Brindle have run both since 2008. Sometime in 2024, the tavern side went dark for a renovation that co-owner Wareham told a local blogger he wanted to keep as a surprise. The pizza shop and its dining room reopened to the public not long after. The bar did not. By the time Wareham spoke with the news outlet St. Pete Rising in June of this year, the tavern had been closed for what he called nearly two years, and the reopening was still described the way it had been described the previous fall: coming later this year, no firm date yet.
That is a long stretch for a single-owner renovation on a corner that, historically, has rarely gone that long without becoming something new.
A Corner That Has Always Been Something
The building at 201 7th Avenue North dates to 1925, back when the surrounding blocks were still known as North Shore rather than Old Northeast. The name change came in the 1970s, the same decade the neighborhood's residents formalized the civic organization that still runs it today. Before the tavern claimed the corner, the space cycled through several identities that St. Pete Rising and the alt-weekly Creative Loafing Tampa Bay have both documented over the years:
- A neighborhood pharmacy
- A market
- A diner
- A laundry
- A convenience store
- A bistro
Each version served the same few blocks of residents in a different form, sometimes for a decade, sometimes for a few years. What's notable is not that the corner kept changing hands. It's how fast it kept turning over, at least until Old Northeast Tavern opened in 2006 and, for the better part of two decades, simply stayed.
Same Owners, Longer Pause
When Wareham and Brindle bought the tavern from previous owners Dan Soronen and Sarah Potter in 2008, Soronen told Creative Loafing something that reads differently now than it did at the time.
"No matter who's here, I don't see this place going away."
He was talking about the tavern surviving a change in ownership. What actually happened is closer to the opposite test: the tavern surviving an unusually long stretch under the same ownership, where the thing that paused wasn't who ran the corner but whether it was open at all. Soronen, for what it's worth, hasn't left the neighborhood's food scene. He now has a hand in a planned Vietnamese coffee concept on Central Avenue, alongside past projects that include Shackleton's Folly and Brew Burgers.
The distinction matters if you've lived near that corner long enough to notice the difference between a business changing hands and a business just going quiet. Old Northeast Tavern isn't being sold, flipped, or reinvented by someone new. It's the same two owners finishing a renovation that has taken longer than the "this fall" Wareham mentioned back in the summer of 2024.
What Comes Back, and What Doesn't
The tavern obtained its liquor license as far back as February of 2024, according to Wareham, but hadn't been able to use it while the buildout was underway. When it does reopen, expected later this year per his most recent comments, the changes are specific rather than sweeping. Burgers and fries will appear on the menu for the first time in the tavern's history. A cocktail program is coming, built around that long-dormant liquor license.
What isn't changing is the reason people kept coming back in the first place. Old Northeast Pizza's thin-crust, New Jersey-style pies aren't going anywhere, including specialty builds like the Del Mar, topped with crab, shrimp, and smoked gouda, and the Wild Mushroom, built on shiitake and crimini mushrooms, prosciutto, and pesto. The tavern's chicken supreme sandwich, loaded with grilled chicken, bacon, gorgonzola, avocado, pesto, tomato, and lettuce, isn't disappearing either. The corner is adding a bar. It isn't replacing a kitchen.
The Corner Doesn't Work Alone
Part of why the tavern's absence has been so noticeable is that it never operated in isolation. The building it occupies also houses Black Crow Coffee, which kept the corner functioning as a daily stop even while the bar side sat empty. Directly across the street sits the Old Northeast Community Garden, a small plot that turns the intersection into something residents pass on foot rather than drive past.
That's consistent with how the rest of 4th Street North operates. The corridor runs on a mix of cafes, casual spots, and small restaurants that residents treat as an extension of their own blocks, walkable enough that a coffee run and a pizza pickup can happen on the same short loop. From October through May, that same on-foot habit extends toward the Saturday Morning Market at Al Lang Stadium, which draws neighborhood residents on foot rather than by car. None of that traffic depends on the tavern being open. All of it explains why the tavern's two-year gap registered as a loss rather than a shrug: the corner was still busy, just missing one piece of what made it whole.
The Neighborhood's Other Long Runs
The tavern's return isn't the only long-running fixture on these blocks. The Historic Old Northeast Neighborhood Association, known locally as HONNA, was organized and incorporated in 1974, within a few years of the neighborhood adopting its current name. It's one of the oldest neighborhood associations in the city, and it still runs the annual Candlelight Tour of Homes, a walking and trolley tour that has passed the quarter-century mark and reliably sells out. Tickets for the tour are sold in person at a short list of neighborhood businesses, including Marion's, Sunken Gardens, and the Old Northeast Rally Station, which means the tour's own ticketing depends on the same kind of small, walkable commerce that keeps 4th Street North functioning day to day.
Seen next to HONNA's 52 years of continuous operation and the tour's own quarter-century run, a two-year pause on one corner looks less like an aberration and more like the neighborhood's version of ordinary. Things here tend to last. When they pause, they tend to come back as themselves, not as something unrecognizable.
That's the part worth sitting with. Old Northeast Tavern's reopening will read, to a lot of people, as news about a bar. The more accurate read is that the corner at 7th and 4th has spent a hundred years refusing to sit empty for long, and the current gap is about to end the same way every previous version of that corner did: as something the neighborhood can walk to again.
If you've been watching that corner and wondering what else is shifting along 4th Street North, or you're curious what a block's daily rhythm actually tells you about living there long term, Plotkin Homes keeps closer track of these details than most market reports ever will.
