The End of the Line
Red Hook does not reward impatience. There is no direct subway line. You take the F or G to Smith-9th Streets and walk fifteen minutes west, or you take the B61 bus from the Red Hook waterfront, or you walk from Carroll Gardens, which takes about as long but feels more deliberate. By any route, you commit to Red Hook before Red Hook commits to you. That commitment is the first filter.
Conover Street sits near the western edge of the neighborhood's industrial waterfront — the kind of block that looks, from certain angles, like it hasn't decided what it wants to be yet. A former port infrastructure, a cluster of warehouses, the occasional food truck. The building housing Sunny's is narrow brick with a small sign above the door. There is no neon. There is no host. You would not find this bar without knowing it was there, and even then you might walk past it once.
Who Sunny Was
The bar opened in 1890 as John's Bar and Restaurant, serving the stevedores, sailors, and waterfront workers who moved cargo through one of Brooklyn's most active port districts. It stayed in the Balzano family across three generations. Antonio "Sunny" Balzano — the man whose name it carries now — grew up in the apartment directly above the bar. He was the inheritor rather than the founder, and he turned the place into something with a particular gravity.
Under Sunny's watch in the 1980s and 1990s, as the cargo work left Red Hook and the neighborhood began its long, complicated reinvention, the bar kept both populations in the room at once: the people who'd always been there and the artists and newcomers who were beginning to arrive. That two-crowd dynamic, which could easily have been a tension, became the bar's whole character. It was the one place in the neighborhood where a night out felt like it belonged to everyone.
Sunny died in 2016. The bar is now run by his widow, Tone Balzano Johansen — a Norwegian artist whose name, she often notes, rhymes with "tuna, like the fish." She has kept the whole thing alive with a specific, dogged commitment, the kind that comes from knowing exactly what would be lost.
The Bar Itself
The interior is what you hope for from a bar that has been accumulating itself since 1890. The walls are layered with photographs, pennants, and knick-knacks — the category of decoration that only works when nothing was installed on purpose. The jukebox is present and operational. The light is warm and low in a way that does not feel designed.
There is no standing-room crowd fighting for the bartender's attention. There is no twelve-step cocktail program. What there is, most nights, is the bar doing the thing bars are supposed to do: a place to sit, something to drink, and a room that is not trying to be anything other than what it already is. That combination is rarer than it should be.
The ceiling is low. The chairs are mismatched. The particular amber of the room comes partly from the lights and partly from everything the walls have absorbed over 130-odd years of the same function. You feel the accumulation in a way you don't have to think about — it simply settles in.
What Sandy Did, What the Neighborhood Did
In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy pushed a storm surge through Red Hook that flooded Sunny's extensively. The bar sustained structural damage and was forced to close for what stretched into months. By any reasonable projection, it might have stayed closed.
Instead, the neighborhood organized. A benefit concert raised $12,000. An Indiegogo campaign, targeted at $65,000, eventually drew support from well beyond Red Hook — friends, regulars, former regulars who'd moved away, strangers who'd heard what Sunny's meant. Total fundraising reached about $68,000. Sunny's reopened in September 2013. The fact that a bar on an out-of-the-way street could draw that kind of collective effort says something about what the place meant — and what it continues to mean.
Tone's Bluegrass Jam
Tone Balzano Johansen leads regular bluegrass sessions at Sunny's — called Tone's Bluegrass Jam — which she has been running for more than twenty years. The sessions have moved around the calendar over the decades; the current schedule is worth checking before you go. Whatever night it lands on, the dynamic is the same: people bring instruments, others come to listen, and for a few hours a bar in Red Hook sounds like somewhere Appalachian, translated.
This is the odd thing about Sunny's: it is either very quiet or very specifically alive, depending on whether there's music. The jukebox nights are one kind of evening. The bluegrass nights are another. Both are correct versions of the same room.
Practical notes
- Address: 253 Conover Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY 11231
- Getting there: No direct subway — F/G to Smith-9th Streets, then walk west (~15 minutes); or the B61 bus from the waterfront
- Hours: Check the bar's website or Instagram for current hours; Red Hook schedules are worth confirming before making the trip
- Go for: The jukebox any night; Tone's Bluegrass Jam (check @sunnysbarofficial on Instagram for current schedule)
- Best window: A quiet weeknight, or the evening of a scheduled jam
- What to do after: Walk toward the water on Conover Street; the Red Hook waterfront is two minutes away
The point
The best bars in New York are always at the end of something — a long bus ride, a fifteen-minute walk through an industrial block, a neighborhood that hasn't been made convenient yet. The inconvenience is not incidental. It is the selection mechanism. The people who end up at Sunny's on any given night are the people who specifically wanted to be there. A hundred and thirty years of Red Hook, two world wars, the collapse of waterfront commerce, and a hurricane — and the bar is still exactly what it was: a place to sit down at the end of the line, with a drink, in a room that has held that function longer than anyone currently in it has been alive.
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Sources consulted: sunnysredhook.com · brooklynpaper.com · gothamist.com · bkmag.com · atlasobscura.com
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