Exclusive | How a downtown Manhattan bar turned into a vibrant tribute to more than 7K first responders after 9/11

Not all heroes wear capes.Some wear patches, and one Manhattan bar will never forget that.Nearly every inch of the walls and ceilings of O’Hara’s Restaurant and Pub, located a block south of the World Trade Center site, is covered with patches — more than 7,000 of them — from police officers, firefighters, EMTs and military from all 50 states and around the globe.“Even Guam,” co-owner Mike Keane told The Post.

“All over the world, everybody’s been through here.They know about the patches, and they want to have theirs hung with the rest of their brethren.”The Cedar Street watering hole was a “Cheers”-style gathering place that brought together Wall Streeters, first responders and tradesmen before Sept.

11.On that day, the place was so consumed by dust and debris that Keane thought it might not stand.When it reopened in April 2002, O’Hara’s became a haven for those still working the scene at Ground Zero and a place where they could share devastating news about the bar’s onetime regulars.“You’d be talking to someone, and they’d say, ‘Remember Jeff who used to come in? He didn’t make it,'” Keane, 63, said.Tthe tradition to honor first responders on the bar’s walls started on the first anniversary of the tragedy.“One of the construction guys decided to take a patch off one of the FDNY guy’s shirts and staple it to the bar,” he recalled.

It was from a fireman from Ten House on Liberty Street, the first fire station to respond to the tragedy.“At the end of that day, there might have been 20 patches stapled up around the top of the bar.And then, as you can see now, it got away from us a little bit.”Tim Brown, a 20-year FDNY vet and 9/11 survivor who was a supervisor in Mayor Giuliani’s Office of Emergency Management, began frequenting O’Hara’s after the 9/11 Memorial & Museum opened in 2014.“I lost nearly 100 friends, so I go visit my friends’ names [at the memorial], say hi to them four or five times a ...