Walk down 7th Avenue North toward 2nd Street and you will pass a plaza that has not changed shape in a century, even though almost everything sold out of it has. The pizza counter is open, TVs bolted to the wall, a handful of regulars working through a pie at the high-tops. Next door, the windows are still covered. That second storefront is Old Northeast Tavern, and as of this writing it remains the one thing in the plaza that has not reopened.
Most of the neighborhood already knows the short version. The tavern went dark about two years ago for a renovation that combined it with the pizza shop next door, and as of this summer, owner Bob Wareham told St. Pete Rising the whole thing is expected to reopen later this year, though he still hasn't settled on an exact date. What gets lost in the short version is what this corner has actually been doing since 1925, and why a stretch of quiet in one storefront's history barely registers against the rest of it.
A hundred years of the same job
The building at 201 7th Avenue North went up in 1925, back when this part of St. Petersburg was still called North Shore. The neighborhood would not adopt the name Old Northeast until the 1970s, which means this address has been serving the same three or four blocks of houses since before the neighborhood had its current name.
Over the decades, the tenant list reads like a small history of what a neighborhood corner is actually for: Fender's Pharmacy, Elsie's Market, North Shore Sundries, Nan & Lou's Fountainette, N&L's Restaurant, and a Mediterranean restaurant called Ambrosia that held the space right before the tavern arrived in 2006. Every one of those businesses sold the same basic thing in different packaging: a reason to walk instead of drive. A prescription filled two blocks from home. A quart of milk. A diner stool. A cocktail after work. The corner has never been vacant long enough to become a landmark in the tourist-brochure sense. It has just quietly kept its job.
Two owners, eighteen years, one strategy
The tavern itself has changed hands before. In the mid-2000s, original owners Dan Soronen and Sarah Potter put it up for sale after family illness up north forced them to liquidate both the tavern and a neighboring ice cream shop. Bob Wareham, previously the owner of Sea Critters on St. Pete Beach, bought it, and he brought on business partner Mark Brindle. The two have owned both Old Northeast Tavern and Old Northeast Pizza next door since 2008.
Eighteen years of continuous ownership by the same two people is not the norm nearby. A few blocks over on 4th Street North, the former Boston Market building sat boarded up through the start of this year while a Cook Out worked its way through permitting, the kind of national chain turnover that has never touched this particular corner. It matters here because it explains the pace of what happened next. When Wareham and Brindle decided to renovate, they were not a landlord trying to flip a struggling lease. They were two guys with two decades of equity in one small plaza, which is exactly the kind of owner who can afford to take longer than a typical renovation timeline allows.
What two years of quiet actually bought
The pizza shop never closed. That is the detail that separates this from a standard local-bar-shutters story. While the tavern side went dark, Old Northeast Pizza kept its doors open and kept its dining room going, which meant the renovation next door was never a cash emergency. The two businesses used the downtime to physically merge: the old tavern game room became an expanded pizza dining area with five flat-screen TVs, giving both sides more room than either had on its own.
The tavern secured its full liquor license in February 2024, and by that August, Wareham was already telling a local blog the license was sitting unused, with the reveal promised for that fall. Fall 2024 came and went. The tavern was still closed the following summer, and by June 2026, St. Pete Rising was reporting it had been shut for almost two years, with Wareham now saying only that it would happen later this year, again with no exact date attached. That is an unusual amount of patience for a small operator to show with a permit that costs money to hold and nothing to use, and it only makes sense if the renovation was never about racing toward a reopening date. It was about not reopening until the combined space was ready to be one operation instead of two adjacent ones.
Wareham has been consistently tight-lipped about the exact reveal. Back in 2024 he told a local blog he wanted it to be a surprise, and two years later he still hadn't said much more than that. What is confirmed, from his more recent conversation with St. Pete Rising: burgers and fries will join the menu for the first time, a departure for a place that has never served them before, and cocktails will finally be possible under the new liquor license. Old Northeast Pizza's thin-crust, New Jersey-style pies, including the crab-and-shrimp Del Mar and the shiitake-and-prosciutto Wild Mushroom, are expected to carry over unchanged, and the tavern's longtime Reuben and steak sandwich are expected to return as well.
| Staying the same | Changing at reopening |
|---|---|
| Reuben sandwich and tavern steak sandwich | Burgers and fries, new to the menu |
| Old Northeast Pizza's thin-crust pies, including the Del Mar and Wild Mushroom | Cocktails, now possible under the tavern's liquor license |
| Same corner, same address, same two owners since 2008 | Shared dining room built from the old tavern game room |
Why the corner never actually stopped running
It is worth separating what closed from what didn't. The tavern going dark for two years sounds like a gap in neighborhood life, but the plaza itself never lost its morning or its civic function. Black Crow Coffee occupies the same building and has been pouring pour-overs and baking muffins in-house since 2015, when owners Greg Bauman and Deanna Hawk opened it a few blocks from their own house. Across the street, the Old Northeast Community Garden has kept doing what community gardens do, independent of whatever is happening with liquor licenses next door.
So the honest read on the last two years is narrower than it might sound. The neighborhood did not lose its gathering place. It lost its evening gathering place, specifically, while the morning one kept running the entire time. Whatever reopens later this year is not a revival of something the neighborhood forgot how to live without. It is the return of one specific slot in the day that has been missing since the renovation started, sitting next to a coffee shop that never skipped a morning and a garden that never needed permission from either business to keep growing.
What this actually tells you about the neighborhood
A tavern reopening after two years could read as a comeback story, the kind where a struggling local business claws its way back from the brink. That is not what the record supports here. The pizza shop's doors stayed open the whole time. The license sat unused for the better part of two years because the owners chose patience over urgency. The renovation expanded the footprint rather than shrinking it. Every signal points to two owners with eighteen years of standing in this plaza deciding to do something ambitious with the time they had, not something desperate.
That is also, in miniature, the story of the corner itself going back a hundred years. A pharmacy became a market became a diner became a restaurant became a tavern, and at no point did the address sit empty long enough to become a story about decline. Whatever reopens at 201 7th Avenue North later this year will be recognizable to anyone who has lived in Old Northeast for a while, because every owner who has ever held this corner understood the same thing: its job was never to be the most exciting spot in the neighborhood. Its job was to be there, and to keep being there, one owner and one menu update at a time.
If you want the next update on the reopening as soon as it lands, or you are just trying to keep a running list of what is actually happening on the ground in Old Northeast, that is the kind of local detail Brad Bess tracks closely for the neighborhood he works in every day.
