Benjamin Norman for The New York Times Tone Johanson and her husband, Sunny Balzano, are preparing to reopen Sunny’s, a mainstay of the Red Hook waterfront that has been closed since Hurricane Sandy struck. On its forlorn cobblestone street, Sunny’s Bar in Red Hook, Brooklyn, appears to be the kind of tough waterfront dive where a fellow could get his thumbs broken for hustling pool or reneging on a deal.
But Hurricane Sandy was tougher.
Like a vicious thug, it upended booths and tables, tore up the electrical, heating and other operating systems and ripped open the foundation of its pre-Civil War brick building. It almost drowned one of its owners and knocked the bar out of business for 10 months.
But the saloon, which is really a dive with charisma and an aesthetic soul that in recent decades has drawn painters, writers and musicians as it once drew longshoremen, has bounced back. As a result of Internet fund-raisers, volunteer sweat that cleaned out the debris and donations from doting patrons, it was able to let people know this week that it will reopen to the public on Aug. 29, the 79th birthday of the owner Sunny Balzano.
“I can’t wait to celebrate,†said Tone (pronounced TOO-na) Johansen, Mr. Balzano’s wife and the bar’s manager. “I’ll be singing, there’ll be a big cake and we’ll ring the ship’s bell hanging in the bar.â€
After 10 gloomy months of managing the bar’s resurrection Ms. Johansen is ready to bust out and party. She will sing songs she has written, like “Brooklyn Paradise†â€" a tribute to the bar. Jazz and bluegrass friends will jam. The abstract paintings of Mr. Balzano will adorn the walls.
The signature bar’s return is a capstone for the restoration of Red Hook, the proletarian enclave of tumbledown houses and factories that has been luring artists, hipsters and homesteaders. At least 500 residential buildings and 100 businesses â€" including a Fairway market â€" were swamped by Hurricane Sandy, resulting in a whirlpool of insurance claims, loan applications and repair bills but also a swarm of neighbors and outsiders eager to clean up the muck.
“It’s much more than bar, it’s a Red Hook institution that has struggled to come back,†said John McGettrick, co-chairman of the Red Hook Civic Association, who will be hoisting a Budweiser at the party.
The mood at the bar is far different than it has been since the hurricane struck. Ms. Johansen, a 47-year-old native of Norway, compared the “relentlessness†of the disaster and the scores of chores needed to put things in order to being “strapped in the Cyclone and you can’t get off.â€
“I found out what depression was,†she said. “You feel frozen, numb. You can’t function. But at the same time you have to fight to get things done. It’s like having heart surgery and someone asks you to get up and run a marathon.â€
Benjamin Norman for The New York Times In recent years, Sunny’s has drawn the painters, writers and musicians who have moved to the neighborhood just as it once drew local longshoremen.Sunny’s has the charm of a cluttered antique store, with ceiling fans, wainscoting, a jumble of paintings and bric-a-brac, even a banjo made of a toilet seat, surrounding its chipped but sturdy wooden bar. Among the knickknacks are plaster statues of the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart and Louis Armstrong â€" all favorites of Mr. Balzano’s.
Mr. Balzano is the bar’s ponytailed beatnik-like presence, bearing the sweet-tempered smile of a mystic and speaking with an anomalous Irish brogue that he attributes to his sometime career as an actor. He is not certain of the bar’s history, but believes it was started as a sandwich shop roughly 100 years ago by his Neapolitan great-grandfather â€" whose faded formal photograph adorns the back wall â€" and grandfather and converted into a bar some years before Prohibition, when in speakeasy fashion it sold homemade wine and the products of an old still that Mr. Balzano later unearthed.
Containerization moved much of the waterfront freight business to New Jersey and the decline of manufacturing emptied even more blue-collar row-houses and tenements. During the 1980s, the bar became, in Mr. McGettrick’s words, “a town hall of sorts†for residents fighting the profusion of garbage plants. With the influx of artists â€" they could buy forsaken houses for a few thousand dollars â€" it became the scene of crowded literary readings by writers like Amy Sohn, Meg Wolitzer and Andre Aciman and pass-the-hat country-and-western and jazz performances by musicians like Norah Jones and Smokey Hormel.
“This place brought the people here that created the new Red Hook,†said Ms. Johansen, who met Mr. Balzano when she immigrated here in 1996 on an arts grant. The couple have an 11-year-old daughter, Oda.
On the night that Hurricane Sandy struck with thunderous force, Mr. Balzano, who has battled bladder cancer and emphysema, was in his upstairs apartment, Ms. Johansen was in the basement of the building next door “and the window basically exploded†in a torrent of seawater. She barely escaped up a staircase. She still gets unsettled when recalling that night.
Because the bar has been in the family so long, it did not have a lease so it could not get loans from the Small Business Administration, Ms. Johansen said. The $100,000 raised so far has paid for new electrical boxes, a furnace, hot water heaters, steel beams to shore up the ground floor, new floorboards and reupholstered booths.
The business owes a contractor $15,000, but Ms. Johnasen is confident she can pay it back with the proceeds from a fully open bar.
