I Have Been To Many Pubs,

with signed banknotes on the walls and ceilings,

but none with as much in hard cash as McGuire’s Irish Pub in Pensacola, Florida, photograph Panoramio, the story of McGuire’s Irish Pub’s unique decoration can be traced back to 1977, when Martin McGuire and his wife, Molly opened the opened the business. He tended the bar while Molly waited tables, and when she made her first $1 tip, she celebrated by writing the date on it and tacking it to the back bar for good luck, the idea snowballed from there, “It’s 15,000 square feet and there’s dollar bills on every bit of that ceiling and quite a bit of the walls,” owner William “McGuire” Martin told the Chicago Tribune back in 1999, “We count it every year and we pay taxes on the growth in it. We treat it as an asset, and we borrow against it and so forth.” at the time of the interview, McGuire estimated his unique décor to consist of around $175,000, but according to more recent counts, the pub now has nearly two million dollars in autographed bills hanging from its ceiling. That’s a fortune literally at arms length from strangers, most of whom resist the temptation of taking some of that cash for themselves,

thefts from time to time do occur, an employee was once fined and put on probation after allegedly pulling down an estimated $5,000 of green “wallpaper”, and many others have tried using the marked bills to pay for various things around Pensacola, but because every banknote that goes up on McGuire’s ceiling is autographed with a black marker and features staple holes, it’s hard to spend them anywhere in town without anyone noticing them. The Irish pub is a local landmark and the money tradition is very well-known, so whenever someone presents a marked bill virtually anywhere in Pensacola, alarm bells go off, “The teller instantly realized that was probably money from McGuire’s and notified a manager and during that time, the suspect became a little worried and left the building,” one police offer told WEAR-TV about a thief’s attempt to exchange stolen banknotes at a local bank, there is actually a second McGuire’s Irish Pub in Destin, Florida, which, according to a 2017 report had an estimated $1.7 million in cash hanging from its ceiling, you can view both bars web sites here, what a thought, to be able to see a minimum of $1.7 million dollars on walls and ceilings, I would drink to that 'Cheers!'.