Not every hero is remembered with a statue or a headline. At one beloved Manhattan pub, many are honored with something smaller but deeply personal: a patch.
Inside O’Hara’s Restaurant and Pub, just one block south of the World Trade Center site, the walls and ceilings are nearly blanketed with more than 7,000 patches from police officers, firefighters, EMTs and members of the military representing all 50 states and countries across the world.
“Even Guam,” co-owner Mike Keane told The Post. “All over the world, everybody’s been through here. They know about the patches, and they want to have theirs hung with the rest of their brethren.”
Before Sept. 11, the Cedar Street bar had the easy familiarity of a neighborhood “Cheers,” drawing a steady mix of Wall Street workers, first responders and tradesmen through its doors.
But on 9/11, dust and debris swallowed the pub so completely that Keane feared the building might not survive. When O’Hara’s reopened in April 2002, it quickly became a refuge for crews still laboring at Ground Zero — and a place where painful updates about former regulars were quietly shared.
“You’d be talking to someone, and they’d say, ‘Remember Jeff who used to come in? He didn’t make it,’” Keane, 63, said.
The now-famous tradition of covering the bar in patches began on the first anniversary of the attacks, turning O’Hara’s into a living tribute to first responders.
“One of the construction guys decided to take a patch off one of the FDNY guy’s shirts and staple it to the bar,” Keane recalled. The patch belonged to a firefighter from Ten House on Liberty Street, the first firehouse to answer the call that day.
“At the end of that day, there might have been 20 patches stapled up around the top of the bar. And then, as you can see now, it got away from us a little bit.”
Tim Brown, a 20-year FDNY vet and 9/11 survivor who was a supervisor in Mayor Giuliani’s Office of Emergency Management, began frequenting O’Hara’s after the 9/11 Memorial & Museum opened in 2014.
“I lost nearly 100 friends, so I go visit my friends’ names [at the memorial], say hi to them four or five times a week. And I come here three or four times a week … It feels like I’m home,” he said. “This is also a 9/11 museum, just a different kind.”
He’s brought everyone from Navy SEALs and FBI agents to members of the Afghan military’s Female Tactical Platoon to the bar to pay respects.
Amanda Lynch lost her uncle, Michael Boyle of NoHo’s Engine Company 33, in the attacks. Her grandfather, James Boyle, the former president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, spent months searching Ground Zero for his son and died of 9/11-related cancer in 2019.
“I spent a long time looking for answers … and while in New York City one weekend with some time to kill, I went looking for these answers,” she said of a 2019 trip to O’Hara’s, where she met Brown.
Brown became a mentor to Lynch, who decided to become a paramedic. He was by her side a couple years ago, when she stapled both her Philadelphia Fire Department and Pennsylvania state paramedic patches to O’Hara’s storied walls.
“I’d like to think my grandpa and uncle also enjoy a beer under those patches after hours,” said Lynch, who pays an annual homage and who will have a special moment this year with her husband, a fire captain. “And 25 years later, my son now gets to witness his father place his Philadelphia Fire Department patch on the wall too.”
Jake LaFerriere, a second-generation Minneapolis firefighter and founder of the nonprofit Firefighters for Healing, said walking into the bar on a recent visit to New York City was “completely overwhelming.”
“You can truly feel the deep sense of brotherhood, love, respect and tradition within those walls,” said LaFerriere. He added both his Minneapolis Fire Department and Minneapolis Police Department patches to the wall.
Both the living and the dead are immortalized — and Keane makes sure those who can’t put a patch up in person have a chance to be included.
“I was just actually on the phone with a guy from Rhode Island and he wanted to send a patch down for a buddy of his who had passed away … I said, ‘Mail it down to us, I’ll put it up, and then I’ll take a picture for you,’” he said.
In special cases, the honor extends beyond first responders.
Welles Crowther was a 24-year-old equities trader at the Sandler O’Neill investment firm in the South Tower at the World Trade Center. When United Flight 175 hit floors 77-85, he survived because he was in the elevator bank. He went on to save a reported 18 people, leading and even carrying them down the stairs before he went back up to try and help more.
Crowther died when the tower collapsed, but his family discovered his heroism because survivors told the story of the “Man in the Red Bandana“: The young man always kept his signature kerchief in a back pocket since his father gave it to him years earlier.
A red bandana — emblazoned with “19,” the number he wore while playing varsity lacrosse at school in Nyack, now hangs in his honor at O’Hara’s.
“My breath was taken away,” Alison Crowther, his mother, told The Post of seeing it for the first time. “I knew that they had always honored the firefighters and other emergency service workers who traveled to New York to help on and after the attacks, but I never thought they would necessarily know about or include Welles.”
She has been to O’Hara’s around 10 times and said the experience “adds yet another dimension to the understanding of the events of 9/11. I have taken friends there for meals when I meet them at the 9/11 Memorial. My heart always swells to see all of the patches, all of the love, all of the dedication to service represented there.”
This year, Crowther will posthumously be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — just one of many special remembrances on this 25th anniversary.
Keane plans to open the doors of O’Hara’s at 8:30 a.m. on September 11 and close “probably around 2 a.m.
“A lot of people just need a drink, or want to have a toast in memory of someone,” he said. “It’s good that people want to be part of this and want to come here and show respect for all the first responders. Because they don’t always get it all over the place.”
And he’s not worried about running out of room for more patches. If the need arises, “We are just going to put up new walls.”
