Patrick Sullivan Saloon

Designer: Patricia Rutenburg

Embroiderer: Janice Murphy

Year Created: 2003

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Patrick Sullivan’s Saloon, located on the corner of Jackson Avenue
and Central Street, operated as a bar from 1888 to 1907, when
Prohibition closed the doors. It was built by an Irish immigrant who
came to Knoxville to make his fortune after serving as a Union officer in
the Civil War. Its conspicuous Victorian architecture and jaunty copper
dome made it stand out among the approximately 40 saloons in the
neighborhood. After 1907, the old saloon was used as a boarding house,
a bordello, and later, an upholstery shop until it was purchased in 1924
by the Armetta family, Italian immigrants with eight children. They lived
upstairs and ran Liberty Ice Cream Company, Knoxville’s first ice cream
fountain, on the street level. The Armetta family kept the building until
1973, and then it was reopened in 1988 as a restaurant in what is now known
as the “Old City” of Knoxville.