Son of Harry’s Founder To Reopen Wall Street Watering Hole

Harry’s, the bar and restaurant where Wall Street traders cheered their profits and drowned their losses for three decades, is being reopened next month on the same Hanover Square corner by Harry’s son, Peter Poulakakos.Harry’s, which closed in 2003, was a favorite haunt of the traders fictionalized in Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Located in an 1851 brownstone, three blocks from the New York Stock Exchange, it featured a rectangular bar, where customers drank German beer and Scotch whisky, and waiters in black jackets and bow ties, who served shrimp cocktail and steak.The reborn Harry’s will keep the bar, as well as the murals depicting drunken monks making wine that charmed diners for years, and feed the crowds who flood the area from Monday to Friday. It also will target a new group of customers: families who’ve moved into apartments converted from offices deserted byWall Street firms in the 1990s.The restaurant is one of several Poulakakos restaurant ventures, which include Bayard’s, on an upper floor of the same brownstone, and Financier Patisserie and Ulysses’ around the corner on Stone Street. Harry, who wanted Peter to become a banker, owns the real estate.Now 67, Harry Poulakakos immigrated to America from Greece in 1956 and worked at Delmonico’s on Beaver Street as a waiter and manager. In 1972, he opened Harry’s and later two more watering holes in the Woolworth Building and the American Stock Exchange building.“I won’t forget those days,” he says. “The people wanted me to succeed.”Shortly before the first restaurant opened, Harry sat on a nearby park bench worrying about whether he’d earn any money at it, he recalls. A stranger sat down, heard his story, and patted him on the back. “You have no idea what kind of business you’ll do,” Harry remembers the woman saying.With companies such as First Boston, Bear Stearns, and Kidder Peabody & Co. just blocks away through the 1980s, Harry’s served up to 1,000 lunches and hundreds of dinners a day.The restaurant’s patrons sometimes lingered five-deep at the thick wood counter. In an era before cell phones, six free telephones hung in a row for customers to call brokers or their offices. An electronic stock ticker rolled on one wall; two Munifacts machines, with news and prices for the municipal bond market, were mounted over the bar.On St. Patrick’s Day, Harry passed out green carnations and brought in bagpipers. When the DJIA hit 3000 in 1990, he made T-shirts.“Everyone would hang out there,” says Al De Angelis, 58, a municipal bond salesman at Siebert Bradford Shank & Co. who started out in 1971. “There were guys that I actually didn’t believe had jobs because they were there all the time.”Or as Mr. Wolfe put it: “The erstwhile Bond Bores were making so much money they took to congregating after work in a bar on Hanover Square called Harry’s, to tell war stories.”Working late one night at his office at 10 Hanover Square, James Cusser, who worked in municipal bonds at Kidder from 1981 to 1992, remembers seeing young traders “in their gold ties and suspenders” leave Harry’s at 4 a.m. to head straight to work.Joseph Sack, 61, an executive vice president of the Bond Market Association, recalls that when Peter was applying to college, “Harry let it be known that he was wondering if one or two people who went to Georgetown were willing to give his son a recommendation. It turned out there were about 100 letters that came forth from the Georgetown community on Wall Street.”

Son of Harry’s Founder To Reopen Wall Street Watering Hole

Son of Harry’s Founder To Reopen Wall Street Watering Hole

More from the New York Sun

Trump Will Never Give Up His Free Enterprise Policies to the Democrats

Trump Kicks Off Southern Swing in Florida, Warning Voters Against Returning to ‘Dark Age’ of Democratic Rule

Exclusive: The Green Card Holder Who Proves New Jersey Democrats Haven’t Cleaned Up Voter Rolls

France’s Blame Game Begins

Mike Tyson, the Middle East, and Fashion’s Skewed Moral Standards

Israel Is on High Alert After Terror Attack Amid Fears War Will Disrupt Election

Truth and Consequences Out of Tulsa Return To Torment Ethan Hawke in ‘The Lowdown’

Billion Dollar Startup Claims It’s Genetically Engineering and Cloning Dogs To Be Battle-Ready by End of Decade

More from the New York Sun

Trump Will Never Give Up His Free Enterprise Policies to the Democrats

Trump Kicks Off Southern Swing in Florida, Warning Voters Against Returning to ‘Dark Age’ of Democratic Rule

Exclusive: The Green Card Holder Who Proves New Jersey Democrats Haven’t Cleaned Up Voter Rolls

France’s Blame Game Begins

Mike Tyson, the Middle East, and Fashion’s Skewed Moral Standards

Israel Is on High Alert After Terror Attack Amid Fears War Will Disrupt Election

Truth and Consequences Out of Tulsa Return To Torment Ethan Hawke in ‘The Lowdown’

Billion Dollar Startup Claims It’s Genetically Engineering and Cloning Dogs To Be Battle-Ready by End of Decade