Memories flowed like cold beer in the old public bar during a formal farewell for the Kaikohe Hotel.
More than 70 people, among them many a former patron, gathered on Broadway on Friday afternoon to remember "the old girl" in her heyday.
Only the oldest section of the 120-year-old hotel is still standing and that, too, is slowly being dismantled.
Speakers included district councillor Sally Macauley and husband Peter Macauley, a lawyer and St John area committee chair, who in 1970 spent their first night in Northland at the bustling Kaikohe Hotel. That first impression of the town convinced them to stay.
Mrs Macauley recounted some of the pub's milestones, such as the lunch visit by Queen Elizabeth in 1953 and the end of 6 o'clock closing in 1967 - "That's when the hotel really started to roar" - to its decline in the 1990s and 2000s.