
Gainesville restaurant partners Art Guy and Emily McClure will open a new pizza pub in the historic Pleasant Street neighborhood this spring.
Pleasant Street Pizza Pub will run out of the brick-faced building standing at 603 NW 6th St. serving up custom wings, salads, local craft brews and specialty pizzas made from scratch with beer dough.
Guy and McClure—who also own Muñeca’s Taco Garden and Bar in 4th Ave Food Park and raise a daughter together—intended to expand Muñeca’s catering and open a commissary kitchen when they bought the 6th Street building back in 2022. But once they started renovating the building, they quickly realized it would require far more work and money than they planned.
“The foundation was gone, the facade was cracking, the roof rotted out and there was financial uncertainty to boot,” Guy and McClure posted on Facebook.
Thinking through what kind of business they could get up and running after investing in all the necessary renovations, Guy had the idea to bring pizza made with beer dough to Gainesville like he learned how to make while working in Colorado.
According to Guy, a pizza’s base is the element that defines the pizza. Beer dough is not only tasty, he said, it acts as a diastatic-like enzyme aiding in digestion to minimize bloating associated with gluten and carbohydrates.
Even though sourcing local ingredients is logistically more challenging with licensing, Guy said the flavors are worth the hassle. Pleasant Street Pizza Pub will source its ingredients from local suppliers, including nearby breweries.
“We’re kind of in a weird little pizza zone right now where it’s all gotten to be really hipster or New Age pizzas,” Guy said. “At the same time, the traditional stuff is shipped in from everywhere which isn’t very cool for the environment. So we’re going to kind of bring a blend of that to simplify it. Our dough will stand out.”
Along with pursuing a desire to bring something innovative to the Gainesville food scene, the months-long pizza pub renovation made possible by Guy and McClure’s 100-hour weeks running Muñeca’s quickly turned into a passion to also preserve a piece of Pleasant Street history along the way.
“We’ve done our very best to try and pay homage to its roots and keep a slice of Gainesville intact,” they posted. “Something about seeing Gainesville’s change over the years made us very stubborn in making sure this building did not lose its charm.”
Formerly referred to as the Fifth Avenue neighborhood and West Gainesville, the Pleasant Street Historic District where the pizza pub stands is Gainesville’s oldest and largest Black residential area.
Starting with Mt. Pleasant United Methodist Church in 1867, emancipated African Americans freed from surrounding plantations after the Civil War, as well as artisans from Camden, South Carolina, built the 255 buildings contributing to the neighborhood on what was once the Nehemiah Brush estate.
Prominent African American members of the Gainesville community, such as the Chestnut family, trace their roots back to Pleasant Street’s earliest beginnings. Some Blacks like Theodore Gass who held local and state offices during Reconstruction also came from the district.
Between 1866 and 1886, over 65 Black individuals purchased lots from the Brush estate to build businesses, clubs, schools and churches. The district also featured numerous Queen Anne-style residences built by white families.
The Freedmen’s Bureau founded Union Academy in 1867, Gainesville and Alachua County’s first school for African Americans. Starting with 175 elementary through high school students, the school on NW 1st Street taught from pro-northern textbooks and eventually phased into the original Lincoln School in 1923.
Pleasant Street became increasingly segregated and isolated as a self-sufficient sector nearing the turn of the century in the Jim Crow era. But the district was forced to succumb to political influences as the city pushed for extensive housing redevelopments in the neighborhood with federal funding in the 1950s during the civil rights movement.
Following the neighborhood’s historic designation as the Pleasant Street Historic District in 1989, renovators from organizations such as the local Habitat for Humanity, Neighborhood Housing Services of Alachua County and Santa Fe College expanding their downtown campus to the NW 6th Street depot were encouraged to follow the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation and local historic design guidelines in order to retain as many original features as possible during further redevelopments.
Fire insurance maps at the Matheson History Museum indicate the pizza pub building being renovated by Guy and McClure would’ve popped up in the Pleasant Street neighborhood sometime between 1958 and 1961.
Growing up down the street from the building, Guy said he remembers it being breakfast and burger joints at one point before most recently serving as Ricardo George’s Florida Style Barbecue for 20 years.
Once the pizza pub renovation is finished, the building will be able to hold around 34 customers inside, with more seating outside at picnic benches next to an herb garden and a treehouse for children.
Guy and McClure said the most important part of the renovation will be decorating the inside with historic black and white photos of the Pleasant Street Historic District, and the outside with a painted mural preserving the neighborhood’s history for the next generations.
“We want to give some homage,” he said. “You see the million-dollar and half-million-dollar buildings in the back here, it’s been so quickly re-gentrified and it’s only going to speed up with Santa Fe buying up all the land over here. We felt like giving a little time capsule, a little opportunity for the kids who come down here to know that this used to be a groovy old neighborhood full of human beings that had businesses, that paid taxes and fed a lot of good food to the neighborhood.”
Updates on the restaurants opening can be followed on the Pleasant Street Pizza Pub Facebook page.
Will this new eatery comply with the City of Gainesville’s food waste collection Zero Waste Initiative?
So glad someone cares about the historic part of Gainesville. So much has been leveled and nondescript buildings in the place. The pizza place is so refreshing and appreciated.
Wow. Good for Art Guy and Emily McClure. More power to ’em!
So excited for this.