Colleen Flood, the longtime co-owner of The Four Treys Tavern, poured her heart and soul into shaping what Roscoe Village is today and was known as the “unofficial mayor” of the North Side community.
“Walking the dog a distance of two blocks could take two hours because she knew everyone,” said Paul Seng, who co-owned the bar with Ms. Flood and was the love of her life and partner of 45 years.
“And if she didn’t know you, she’d ask you, ‘Now where’d you grow up? Who’s your parents?’ and find a connection,” said her niece, who’s also named Colleen Flood.
“She was the eyes and ears of everything going on,” said Mark Worthley, a longtime Four Treys bartender.
Ms. Flood took immense pride walking its streets because Roscoe Village was not always the trendy neighborhood that people know today, friends and family said.
When she began living above the dog-friendly tavern in the late 1970s with Seng, who purchased the bar a few years earlier, it was a rough neighborhood.
“Gangs were a problem,” Seng said. “There was fighting, tagging, burglaries and the occasional shooting.”
In the 1980s, Ms. Flood and a small group of neighbors came together to patrol the neighborhood on foot and in cars. They would also flood the police with calls about illegal activity and show up to court dates when anyone was criminally charged with causing problems in the neighborhood, said Al Johnson, a close friend and Realtor.
“She’d walk up to gang bangers and tell them, ‘This is our neighborhood, not yours.’ And they’d avoid her. You’d have to meet her to understand,” Johnson said.
Ms. Flood and others formalized the group into Roscoe Village Neighbors, a nonprofit neighborhood association.
A small block party that Ms. Flood and a handful of others started in the 1980s grew into Retro on Roscoe, one of the city’s most popular street festivals. It includes an antique car show because Ms. Flood and Seng were both enthusiasts. Money raised from the festival is used to support local schools and fund community projects.
Ms. Flood died Sept. 19 from cancer. She was 79.
In the 1990s, she loved seeing young families move in, despite some worries that young professionals with kids wouldn’t drink at her bar or might drive out the motorcycle crowds that for years had been loyal customers at The Four Treys.
“Then dive bars started becoming cool, and Four Treys reinvented itself. For years, it was your standard watering hole tavern, and then people started loving it for that,” said her niece, who noted Ms. Flood was no pushover behind the pine.
“I’ve seen her throw full-grown men out of that bar. She was afraid of nothing,” she said.
Ms. Flood, who more recently moved into a home down the street from the bar after years of living above it, always extended an invitation to her family holiday parties to a particularly lonely regular who sat at the end of the bar and had no close relatives.
She also took his dog when he died — a mutt named Odie that was hard to like at first.
“She had a soft spot for the lonely and people down on their luck and would often hire people who were in a tough spot in life,” her niece said.
Ms. Flood was born on Aug. 22, 1944, in Chicago to Thomas and Lenore Flood. Her father was a truck driver, and her mother was a grocery store worker. They raised their six kids in Bridgeport until they divorced, and Ms. Flood, who was 9 at the time, moved with her mother and siblings to the North Side to live with a relative and escape what had been an abusive marriage.
Ms. Flood attended Carl Schurz High School but dropped out to attend beauty school and opened her first salon in her early 20s on the Northwest Side, said Ms. Flood’s sister, Charlis Flood Paglini.
“Her family was poor, and she always told herself, ‘When I grow up, I’m not going to live like this. I’m going to be something,’” said Ms. Flood’s niece.
