Last drinks for Mick at D’Arcy Arms
CONSTRUCTION industry heavyweight and occasional barman Mick Power is heading for the door at his landmark D’Arcy Arms Irish pub in Surfers Paradise.
Mr Power has put the D’Arcy and an adjoining property, being used as a carpark, on the market as a potential tower site.
The holding, which has no height limit, fronts the Gold Coast Highway and Aubrey St and spans 3154sq m.
The move comes on the back of a Power sell-off, for $30m, of a nearby beachfront site and with efforts under way to sell a neighbouring eight-level building.
Mr Power, 71, this week said he had considered developing the D’Arcy holding himself or with a partner but had shelved the idea.
The founder of the BDM group, which bought the D’Arcy Arms in 2004, said he would be leaving behind happy memories.
He said that “off and on” he served behind the bar but got into trouble with the manager for giving too many free beers. “I got behind the bar one night but was still there past the legal trading hour of midnight and the manager, the late singer Patrick O’Hagan’s daughter Fiona, threatened to throw me out.”
Mr Power also said he had some rollicking vocal Friday nights at the D’Arcy with his renditions of Irish favourites Danny Boy and Galway Bay.
The D’Arcy, which includes a motel, has become a Gold Coast institution since it was opened by Roy D’Arcy in August 1988.
It became, in the same year, the first pub in Australia to have Guinness on tap, beer drawn from the first Guinness keg brewed in Queensland.
The D’Arcy package is being marketed by Mark Witheriff and Daniel Doran, of CBRE Gold Coast, and Paul Fraser, of CBRE Hotels, via an expressions-of-interest campaign that closes on October 6.
Mr Witheriff said the D’Arcy Arms parcel was in a development hotspot near the beachfront Northcliffe Tce and offered both residential and tourism development options.