Some bar addresses on Long Island get one name and keep it for fifty years. Then there is 615 East Main Street in Bay Shore, which has been four different pubs since 2013 and, according to the State Liquor Authority, is lining up its fifth. The only active license at the address now belongs to a company called C.O. Foley's LLC, and it has been in effect since September 1.

That is the building Bay Shore currently knows as Kitty Mulligan's Irish Pub, the high-top-and-Guinness room that opened in the spring of 2021 and became the east end of Main Street's reliable stop for live music, parade-day breakfasts and shepherd's pie.

What the records say

The paper trail is short and unambiguous. The State Liquor Authority issued an on-premises restaurant license for 615 East Main Street to C.O. Foley's LLC on July 10. It took effect on September 1 and runs through August 31, 2028. It is the only active license at the address.

Kitty Mulligan's own license tells the other half of the story. The pub poured under a company called BERMO LLC, and that license now sits in the state's inactive file with an expiration date of June 30, 2025. There is no renewal pending under BERMO, under the Kitty Mulligan's name, or under anything else at the address. As far as the state is concerned, whatever pours at 615 East Main from here forward pours as C.O. Foley's.

What the records do not say is what the room will be called, when a changeover happens, or what it means for the pub that is there now. Kitty Mulligan's has posted no farewell, its website still lists regular hours, and its events calendar was still filling this summer. A license landing at an address ahead of any public announcement is the normal order of operations, and it is exactly how this publication has watched a dozen Long Island handoffs start. The paperwork moves first. The sign moves later.

The pub Bay Shore knows

Kitty Mulligan's belongs to Beth and Stephen Bermingham, the couple who found the space in the fall of 2020 and opened it that following March with the pandemic's capacity rules still taped to the door. They built the kind of Irish pub that plays it straight: Guinness and Smithwick's on draft, fish and chips and bangers and mash out of the kitchen, cover bands on the weekend, doors open early on Bay Shore's parade days. Four and a half years on, it is the longest run the address has managed in more than a decade.

A short history of a hard-working address

The state's license files read like a rental history for the building. Kirby O'Kane's Coopersmiths held the license starting in 2013. Coopersmiths Pub took its own license on the same floor in 2015. BK Grossos, a sports bar, arrived on a license effective at the start of 2019. Kitty Mulligan's followed in 2021. C.O. Foley's makes five names in thirteen years.

Read one way, that is a cursed address. Read the way a bar operator would read it, it is the opposite: a room that has never once been allowed to sit empty. Every time a concept has wound down at 615 East Main, another operator has been waiting with a license application, because a turnkey pub east of Bay Shore's downtown core, with the Main Street bar crawl a short drive west and no shortage of neighborhood regulars, is not the kind of space that stays dark on this stretch of the South Shore.

No, not that Foleys

A note for anyone who read last week about Foleys, the Smithtown bar building its second location in Massapequa Park: this appears to be a different Foley entirely. The Smithtown operation runs its rooms through companies named for their streets, RT 347 Associates for the Smithtown Bypass original and Park Blvd Associates for the Massapequa Park room, and its own website lists exactly two locations, neither of them in Bay Shore.

C.O. Foley's LLC is its own company, on file with the state since January 2023 and receiving its papers at a Saint James address. Two unrelated Foleys advancing on Suffolk County bar corners in the same season is a coincidence, but an Irish surname on a Long Island pub license is about the least surprising coincidence the records could produce.

What to watch

The license being effective already means the timeline belongs entirely to the new operator. The tells will be the usual ones: a building permit for the interior, a sign application, an Instagram account that starts following Bay Shore. Until one of those surfaces, the honest summary is this: the address that has reinvented itself four times since 2013 has its next name on file with the state, and the east end of Main Street is not losing its pub, it is getting handed a new one.