Doyle's situation is common - the business is at the mercy of the landlord. Of course many times the landlord is also the same as the owner of the business. Property values have skyrocketed and people cash out.
Sometimes a bar owner lucks out like this classic case in Manhattan
When Hurley's Was Hopping | Front & Center at Rockefeller Center
In 1892, three Irishmen—Daniel and Connie Hurley and Patrick Daly—took a long-term lease on the building and named the ground-floor saloon Hurley Brothers and Daly, which quickly became known as just plain Hurley’s. The bar flourished until the enactment of Prohibition in 1920, but easily adapted to this monumental change by morphing into a speakeasy, with the saloon housed in the rear of the space (accessed by an unmarked door on 49th Street) and a florist shop established in its front window.
In 1928, John D. Rockefeller Jr. began assembling a large parcel of land in the neighborhood for the new Metropolitan Opera House, but after the stock market crashed, he changed his plans dramatically to create Rockefeller Center, aka "the city within the city." His agents purchased 1240 quickly enough, but then encountered a major stumbling block: Hurley’s owners, citing their long-term lease, refused to vacate. Rockefeller asked the Hurleys to make him an offer, and their response was $250 million—the same price that the entire complex was said to cost. Rockefeller declined. And so the RCA building (now known as 30 Rock) was constructed around 1240.
Sixth Avenue’s fortunes changed for the better after the El was demolished in 1939, and Hurley’s prospered too, with a new Rock Center–oriented following: Associated Press reporters and NBC staffers, from stars to stagehands, who nicknamed it Studio 1H. NBC talk show hosts, such as Jack Paar and Steve Allen, began to mention it on the air.
By the ’60s, the saloon became a clubhouse for local publishing and media types, drawn by its handy location and raffish charm. Johnny Carson was then NBC’s star late-night host, and he made Hurley’s a running gag in his monologues—it was the bar where Ed McMahon could be found drowning his sorrows. Random movers and shakers showed up, everyone from Howard Hughes and Henry Kissinger to John Belushi and Jack Kerouac.
