Sunny's Bar to Hold Memorial Day Fundraiser to Stay Alive in Red Hook

Sunny's Bar has faced its share of catastrophes. Among them are Hurricane Sandy, the murder of an ice man on the bar's front step, and the death of Sunny Balzano last year.

The legendary Red Hook landmark, which has been around in some form for about a century, has always survived but it is one the brink once again and needs some support.

The last event of the latest round of fundraising is a Memorial Day BBQ party that starts at noon and ends at midnight. Along with live music, they'll be serving hotdogs from Feltman's of Coney Island with special homemade toppings along with a bag of chips and a can of beer for $7.

The fundraiser is part of an effort to end a family dispute by buying the building to keep the bar alive — and this is a bar worth saving.

"So, good news is we have raised the extra $65,000 we were short for the down payment of Sunny's building," said Danie Hutch, the bar's manager. "Bad news is there are DOB fines and building fees we have inherited which is another $20,000."

The need for extra money after the last round of fundraising was a surprise. She said that in hindsight it would have been better not to put a final number on the amount that could be raised because many unexpected costs have added up. They could even use a donation of liquor if anyone has some to spare.

"I have no idea how to ask people for more when they've given so much," Hutch said. "I feel like we owe so many 'thank you's' to everyone who has pitched in extra."

Sunny and the bar that's named after him has inspired patrons, bartenders and writers alike. In some cases, the inspired person may have been all three at some point.

“There will never be anyone else like Sunny and there never was anyone else like him before he came into being,” Tim Sultan told The New York Times after Balzano's death in March 2016.

Sultan once worked part-time behind the bar and wrote a memoir set there, “Sunny’s Nights: Lost and Found at a Bar on the Edge of the World.”

The Times first immortalized Sunny's with a wonderful story in 2002 by Wendell Jamieson that chronicled its history. Even 15 years ago, the thought of the bar closing had people worried.

''I could have lived on what I get from Social Security,'' Balzano told Jamieson. ''I could just do my paintings right here in the bar, in this atmosphere. But if I were going to close this place because I had a whim to, it would break a lot of people's hearts.''

That is still true. One such heart belongs to David Moo, a cocktail bartender at Quarter Bar. Moo recently helped promote one of Sunny's fundraising events with an email that's worthy of publication as an essay. His words from earlier in the month are just as true now and deserve to be the last on this subject:

There are bars, and then there are bars. Many bars are simply terrible, and we'll not waste time here rehearsing their failings and annoyances. Other bars are quite fine, or even excellent, evincing, more and less, the barroom experience that their proprietors intended you have when they set the place up, making adjustments as necessary with the passing of years. I, for instance, run a nice bar. It does pretty much what we had wanted it to do in offering a restorative evening of solace to any comers, but especially to our neighborhood, wherein they find a fine drink, a remembered song, and a good conversation. You'll soon receive an email inviting you to celebrate quarter in its maturity next month, but I write today not to talk about bars, but to talk about bars.

There are a few bars, and I mean really only a few in the world, that exceed even the great efforts of their proprietors to keep them up and make them go. These are bars that take on lives not only of their own, for any decent bar of some years acquires life as a thing separate from those who conceived it, but lives as legends, places about which ballads are sung and whole books are written, barrooms whose reputations and whose accretion of collective memory could never be held by the actual architectural confines that hold them.

Years ago, I heard a story somewhere (help, anyone?) that Cary Grant once had will-call tickets waiting for him at a box office, and he went up to the window and said, " I have two tickets for Cary Grant," and the box office lady rifled through the envelopes, and then, while handing him his tickets, said, "That's a laugh. You're not nearly as good looking as Cary Grant," to which Cary Grant replied, "No one is...no one is."

Well, in the same way that there are actors who are famous now, and then there are actors who will still be famous 50 years from now, there are some bars that have acceded to the position of Legendary Bar. These are places that one might visit without any context, and see the shabby ravages of time that have worn their exteriors, and yet, within 20 minutes and a single round of drinks, one comes to understand that one has found one of the Greats. These are the bars that when you mention them to the initiated they either slowly nod, as if in a beautiful reverie, or snort derisively, as if to scold you for not having known earlier. These are bars that are distinguished not by the sublime concoctions one may (or may not) find in the glassware, but by the attachment and bonhomie one senses around the place. Every bar owner in the world wishes that he or she could run such a bar, but alas, owning such a bar cannot be organized, it can only be conferred: conferred by time, conferred by memory, conferred by community. Cary Grant wasn't alone in creating Cary Grant. It was you and me.

I write today to alert you all to the endangerment of such a legendary bar. Sunny's is a bar in Red Hook, Brooklyn, all the way at the edge of the known universe. It was opened by Sunny Balzano's parents as a longshoreman bar sometime during the Roosevelt Administration, I'm not sure which one. They ran it for decades until it went fallow for many years, taken up again by Sunny in the early 90's with the encouragement of his friends and neighbors. It's a simple affair. Mostly a beer and a shot establishment, there's some smart artwork on the walls, and rootsy music often played live from the backroom. It's notable for always being perfectly hip, without ever having given in to any of the hipster movements that it has seen come and go over the years. When he reopened it, Sunny at first only unlocked the door one day a week. As things gathered steam, it was two days, then three. Then Sunny died last year. As happens in such situations, accounts must be settled, property is exchanged, and things are thrown into flux.

Here's the upshot: the entity that is Sunny's Bar is trying to buy the building that houses it from Sunny's heirs and relatives who would like to let them have it for a reasonable price, and the bar is throwing a series of fundraisers. You could just go to their website and donate, which you should do if you have a mind to, but I suggest that there is a more fun and informative way for you to contribute to the cause of maintaining a legacy of this magnitude and esteem: On Monday, May 15th, that's this coming Monday, Mickey Guagno of quarter Bar, Tim Miner of The Long Island Bar, and I will be guest bartending at Sunny's. We'll be there starting at 6 until something like 10 o'clock. Being cocktail bartenders, we'll be making a single special cocktail, as well as whatever else that comes to hand. Some booze has been graciously donated by Brooklyn Gin, and all proceeds will go to helping Sunny's make the down payment on their building.

The down payment, the troubles, the creaking floorboards, these are the concerns and anxieties that mark the inner life of any old establishment, these are the marks of the real Cary Grant. They are the things that must be addressed to keep alive the other Cary Grant, the perfect one, the one that shimmers on the screen of your memory, the one that makes you sigh and say, "that might be the greatest bar in the world."

— David Moo