Club 23 and the Notre Dame Avenue rooms

documented 1995 — 2007; closing unpinned

Club 23: At 744 North Notre Dame Avenue, on the corner of Notre Dame Avenue and South Bend Avenue, Club 23 was the student bar of its generation. Alumni memory — readers of Notre Dame Magazine's bar retrospective, printed as memory — remembers an earlier incarnation, "Irish Country," a country bar, in the years 1978–82. Its documented record opens with fire: in June 1995 the club burned in the small hours — the bar had closed at 3 a.m. as usual; the alarm came at 3:53, the fire gutting the back pool room and damaging most of the interior, its cause undetermined in Fire Inspector Richard Fogle's finding as the Observer reported it — and owner Mahmoud Hussein's crews rebuilt through the summer to reopen a portion of the building for the Texas game weekend that September. The club's second documented crisis came on 21 August 2007, when two Notre Dame seniors were shot and wounded outside the bar in the early morning; the Observer covered the shooting, the students' wary boycott, and Hussein's insistence that the bar was not closing. No later chapter of Club 23's run was reached by this section: current directory records mark the address permanently closed, but the year of its closing is a named gap, and the bar is not printed as operating past 2007.

The Library and the Goose's Nest: One block of Notre Dame Avenue holds two more names, carried at memory's size by the same alumni testimony: the bar at Notre Dame Avenue and Howard Street was The Library first, and then The Goose's Nest — both names in Notre Dame Magazine's canon of Domer watering holes, with the succession (Library, then Goose's Nest under an owner the commenters name as Dave) resting on the magazine's readers rather than the press record. They are printed as the canon prints them: real rooms in the student geography, their dates unrecovered.

The rest of the canon: Notre Dame Magazine's 2020 roster names further rooms whose individual runs the record reached does not document, and they stand here at list size, as the magazine carries them: Joers', Frankie's and Sweeney's — Sweeney's identified by the magazine as the haunt of the English professor Frank O'Malley — Fat Wally's, Benchwarmer's, Bleachers and Coach's.Observer's advertising and bar coverage across the 1970s–90s, and the city directories — for the pass that would give each its dates.

Sources:

1. The Observer (Notre Dame), 18 September 1995 — the June 1995 fire at Club 23 (3 a.m. closing, 3:53 a.m. alarm, the pool room gutted, cause undetermined per Fire Inspector Richard Fogle), owner Mahmoud Hussein, and the September reopening for the Texas game weekend.
2. The Observer (Notre Dame), 25 August and 14 September 2007 — the 21 August 2007 shooting outside Club 23, 744 North Notre Dame Avenue, two seniors wounded; attendance down; Hussein: the bar is not closing.
3. Notre Dame Magazine, "Bar Tour" (2020) and reader comments on "Soundings: A Toast to the Bars" — the canon roster (Joers', Frankie's, Sweeney's and Frank O'Malley, the Library, the Goose's Nest, Fat Wally's, Benchwarmer's, Bleachers, Coach's); Club 23 remembered as "Irish Country," 1978–82; the Library-to-Goose's Nest succession at Notre Dame Avenue and Howard Street — alumni memory, printed as such. Current directory records mark 744 North Notre Dame Avenue permanently closed; the closing year was not reached.