When the original owner of Roxy’s Pub started serving up booze nearly a century ago, doing so was still a crime.
P.P. Dock, the bar’s founder, was busted in 1933 on charges of “possession of intoxicating liquor.” He had been running a speakeasy at his place at the corner of Okeechobee Road and South Dixie Highway when he was nailed by federal agents, nine months before Prohibition was repealed.
Two months after pleading guilty in October 1934, though, Dock was one of two people to receive the first liquor licenses issued by the city of West Palm Beach.
A year later, he was celebrating the official opening of Dock’s Liquor. An article in The Palm Beach Post noted at the time that “Mr. Dock has been in business at 401 Okeechobee Road since 1929 and has expanded his business to take in the corner site at Dixie and Okeechobee road.”
A Dec. 7, 1934 article in The Palm Beach Post reports P.P. Docks as one of West Palm Beach’s first two recipients of city liquor licenses.
It was the humble beginning of what today is Roxy’s Pub, the city’s oldest bar. In nearly a century of operation, the locale has been run by five owners at three locations.
In its latest iteration, as an Irish pub with upscale décor and a rooftop pool, it’s a far cry from the off-the-books saloon it began as. But then, so is the fast-growing city it serves.
From speakeasy to decades-long role as ‘neighborhood bar’
State Beverage Agent Bob M. Young (right) checks the license of bar owner Harry L. Larocco in this 1968 photo from The Palm Beach Post-Times.
Dock ran the bar for several years before selling it to Berlin Griffin, co-owner of the Palm Beach Kennel Club. One of Griffin’s dog track employees, Harry LaRocco, or “Roxy,” began working at the bar and bought it in 1949. The bar became “Roxy’s” under LaRocco, who ran it for the next 25 years.
During the mid-century it was “a neighborhood bar, frequented by the folks who lived nearby,” according to a 1989 feature story in The Palm Beach Post.
“During the `40s, the place was so busy they had to remove the stools from in front of the massive Brunswick bar to make room for the customers,” the article stated. “In the 1950s, while cowboys were still going to the bars on Military Trail and playing their favorite game of seeing who could knock each other out, Roxy’s attracted a more genteel crowd.”
The Post article described LaRocco as a “a short, stocky man with the appearance and sweet disposition of a Scottish terrier.”
“The old man was hard-nosed,” a neighboring bar owner recalled to The Post years later. “He had one bartender that would just as soon throw you out the door as look at you. And he catered to the old-timers. He didn’t really want any kids in the place.”
Roxy’s forced to move by failed urban renewal project
Roxy’s was purchased in 1974 by Ken Wagner, a New Yorker who moved to the area for a job with a restaurant chain and then bought Roxy’s after a falling out with the company. He expanded it into an eatery by taking over a grill next door.
The bar was patronized by an eclectic mix of workmen, attorneys and elderly ladies in hats. A 1988 article described the bar as “salty” and “”scruffy enough to keep many a middle-class unadventurous soul moving on down the street.”
As crime surged in the 1980s, the bar began to feel the effects of drugs on the surrounding neighborhoods.
“At Roxy’s you had judges alongside winos and streetwalkers,” George Matter, a regular, told The Post in 1989. “The mix was great, but it was right on the edge of crack street.”
Roxy’s owner Ken Wagner is pictured in a 1988 Palm Beach Post article reporting the possibility of Roxy’s leaving its historic location.
A police officer shot and killed a man at the bar in 1983, after the man waved a gun at patrons.
The beginning of the end of Roxy’s time at its original location came in 1986. The building’s owner sold it to developers Henry Rolfs and David Paladino, who razed it three years later as part of a failed urban redevelopment project called Downtown/Uptown.
With its historic home gone, Wagner moved Roxy’s downtown.
Downtown landlord tries – and fails – to ban Roxy’s name
Roxy’s Pub as seen at night in this 2011 photo.
Roxy’s reopened in 1989 in the historic Comeau building on Clematis Street, between Olive Avenue and Dixie Highway. The locale’s massive Brunswick bar — reportedly brought to the bar in the 1920s from Palm Beach’s Whitehall Hotel — was moved too, but the neon sign, which hung outside the bar for most of its more than 50 years, remained in storage.
There was a reason for that. The bar was moving to a more upscale location, and the building’s owners insisted the bar not be called Roxy’s. It would have to be renamed the “Comeau Bar and Grill.”
“Calling it Roxy’s, building owners thought, would attract the old crowd, the wrong crowd, and threaten the serenity of the neighborhood,” The Post reported at the time.
The location, steps away from the courthouse, law offices and City Hall, brought a more professional crowd. But the old regulars kept coming, too. And they kept calling it Roxy’s.
“Does anybody call this Comeau’s? Oh, hell no.” one long-timer said at the time.
Within a few months the building owners had relented. By the beginning of 1990, an awning outside the bar said “Roxy’s” once more.
Move to Clematis coincides with downtown revival
West Palm Beach Mayor Lois Frankel celebrates her reelection in 2007 at Roxy’s. (Allen Eyestone, The Palm Beach Post)
Clematis Street at the time was not the bustling entertainment district that it is today. When Roxy’s opened there it was just one of a handful of bars on a main street that was mostly deserted after dark.
But the avenue was slowly beginning to pick up.
By 1993, in addition to Roxy’s, the downtown strip included Respectable Street Café, which opened in 1987, Lost Weekend, the Underground Coffeeworks, Narcissus and the Metropolis Club. It was the beginning of a downtown scene.
In 1997 Roxy’s moved again — but not far this time. Wagner bought a building two doors down from the Comeau building and moved Roxy’s Bar and Grille to its current location: 309 Clematis St.
Fed up by then with the owner of the Comeau building, Wagner and his wife Pat strutted down the street to their new home, accompanied by a bagpiper.
No longer a tenant in someone else’s building, the bar finally stayed put, thriving as a popular lunch spot. By then Roxy’s had become a downtown fixture, a popular place for politicians to watch election night results come in and, with luck, celebrate their victories.
By the mid-2000’s, though, the business was is upheaval. The bar, like many other Clematis businesses, suffered in the after-work hours because of years-long road construction that left the city’s main street torn up for long stretches.
The downturn eventually became too much for Wagner. Fed up with the street construction, he sold the business in 2005.
“I’ve had friends who used to come to Roxy’s tell me, ‘I’m tired of trying to get to you,’” he said at the time.
New owner ushers in modern Roxy’s we know today
Top of the Rox rooftop pool, lounge, restaurant and nightclub at Roxy’s Pub at 309 Clematis Street on July 12, 2025 in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Wagner sold his bar to John Webb, who reopened it in early 2007 as an upscale Irish Pub, with a pool table, fireplace and booths surrounding the central bar. Two years later he added Sky 309, a rooftop bar with a dance floor.
Roxy’s hosted live music, including large acts that played shows in the empty lot behind it. Popular 1990s-era rock bands such as Live and Candlebox performed. In 2010, Snoop Dogg played for a crowd of 3,000.
The Snoop Dogg Sunday Funday Party at Roxy’s in 2010. (Richard Graulich, The Palm Beach Post)
Leaning into its new branding as an Irish pub, Roxy’s began hosting St. Patrick’s Day block parties.
More than a decade later, Webb moved to change the city’s oldest bar with the times again. In 2023, as the city underwent a wave of post-pandemic migration, he moved forward with plans for a $17 million project to add a rooftop pool, which opened this year.
“I figured it was time, considering the influx of people,” he told The Post, “particularly the high-end financial community — the hedge funds are moving in. There’s a 12-story building going in behind me.”
Today the pool is open and that 12-story building looms behind it. Development keeps coming, pushing the city skyward. Changed and dramatically expanded, Roxy’s still stands.
Andrew Marra is a reporter at The Palm Beach Post. Reach him at amarra@pbpost.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Prohibition, gunfire, politicos and Snoop Dogg: Roxy’s has seen it all