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2009 — still pouring
The planned bar district's pub: Eddy Street Commons, the university-anchored development on the campus's south edge, is the Five Points row's planned successor, and its pub space at 1044 East Angela Boulevard opened as Kildare's Irish Pub, the chain pub of the new center. By 2016 the room traded as O'Rourke's Public House under the Navarre Hospitality group — the directory and review record carries it under that name from that year — and its documented interruption is the pandemic's: in March 2020 Navarre's founder, Kurt Janowsky, voluntarily closed O'Rourke's together with downtown's Cafe Navarre and the group's Elkhart restaurant as the COVID shutdown began. The room reopened, and the present record is continuous: the Tribune counted it among the game-day bars for the January 2025 championship run, Indiana's July 2024 repeal of the forty-year happy-hour ban found it planning weekday specials, and diners were reviewing it in October 2026 — the Commons' Irish room operating in November 2026, a block from the stadium, in the geography the Northeast neighborhood's bars held for a century before it.
Sources:
- Wanderlog and directory records for O'Rourke's Public House, 1044 East Angela Boulevard — "the establishment formerly known as Kildaire's"; the March 2020 voluntary closure by Navarre Hospitality's Kurt Janowsky, with Cafe Navarre and Artisan. OpenTable and TripAdvisor review records — O'Rourke's trading under that name by June 2016 and reviewed through October 2026.
- South Bend Tribune, 17 January 2025 — O'Rourke's among the championship game-day bars; June 2024 — the happy-hour law change and the pub's planned specials, on the law's 1 July 2024 effect.