Alison Gwynn met Danyelle Byrd playing basketball together when they were 9. Their friendship only grew from there.
After high school, Byrd went to Northern Kentucky to play basketball, and Alison Gwynn moved to Philadelphia to attend Drexel University, where she met her now-husband Keith Gwynn.
“She said you have to meet my best friend, so we drove nine hours from Philly to meet this girl,” Keith Gwynn said.
He recalls the first time he met her: She gave him the cold shoulder, and he went back out to the car to wait for Alison.
“Fast forward, we become best friends, talking about business ideas and owning our own bar together,” Keith Gwynn said. “I was in her wedding when she married Jess.”
Byrd had lived in Atlanta with her wife for three years when she suffered a fatal brain aneurism in her home at 31-years-old.
“I was at work one day at a real job, not owning a bar, and Alison called me and said, ‘D is dead.’ I was like, ‘who’s D?’ I couldn’t comprehend it,” Keith Gwynn said. “From that point, it was my mission to open a bar.”
Byrd was a general manager for Friday’s and Longhorn and had always worked in the service industry. Keith Gwynn said that opening a bar together was their retirement goal; they would always talk business.
After Byrd passed, Alison, Keith and Byrd’s wife, Jessica, didn’t want to make the bar opening a retirement goal anymore. They got started looking for bars for sale.
“We looked at old Virgil’s Café, now Cork N Crust, but it was out of our budget,” Keith Gwynn said. “I wanted a place like Cheers where ‘everybody knows your name.’ At the time, this place was Brozzarts. We sit right down here, and Woody [the bartender] comes over and said, ‘you all aren’t from here’ I was like, ‘what gave it away the mixed couple sitting at the end of the bar?’ He said this is a great place, and our owner is selling. The owner was Ryan Brozzart; I call him up, and he says my wife wants to sell, but I don’t. Keep looking. I kept coming in, and I’m not a beer drinker, but that’s all they had, so I would drink beer. Finally, he came up said, ‘Keith, make me an offer.’ This place never hit the market; it never went up for sale. I feel like Danyelle was guiding me.”
The original bartender lived upstairs; he gave up his job and home to help them out, Keith Gwynn said.
The building was built in the 1900s and has always been a bar/restaurant, with Brozzarts operating there for 47 years.
“The first thing we did was tear out the entry and reframe it,” Keith Gwynn said. “People would walk by, pop their heads in, and ask questions.”
He did the renovations himself with no previous experience and the help of a plumber, electrician and a friend.
He and Alison Gwynn said they had to get creative. There were at least five layers of wallpaper, paint and smoke stains that had built up over the many years of operation. They ended up spray painting paneling and putting that on the walls.
“I’m from Philly, so I’m demoing, and I find this piece of paper folded up, and I find the NFL square from the Green Bay Packers versus Philadelphia Superbowl in 1960,” Keith Gwynn said. “Everything has just worked out for us, the timing the location and being a Philly bar but in Kentucky, I’ve named it ‘Phillytucky.'”
Some of the sports memorabilia around the bar are Byrd’s jerseys, pictures of the team and a basketball signed by NKU’s 2008 National Championship team, which Byrd was a part of and deemed one of her greatest accomplishments.
“We didn’t take over until Oct. 1, 2019. On Oct. 19, we opened our doors,” Keith Gwynn said. “We did all the reno in just 18 days.”
Byrd passed away on Oct. 14, 2018, making the opening of Danyelle’s Bellevue Tavern almost one year from the day of her death.
